LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, ? 



: (!':.. n) .13..fy.... fcright I 



4: 



a. ;. 



fNITED STATES OF AMERICA, f 



THE 



CHUECH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



BV 



THE REV. CHARLES H HALL, D.D., 

RECTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, BROOKLYN, N. Y. 




NEW YORK: 
PUBLISHED BY HURD & HOUGHTON. 
Brooklyn — The Church Charity Foundation. 

i878.]7g>- 1 - 7 *1 




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by 
EDWIN BEERS, Treasurer, 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



STEREOTYPED AT THE 

CHURCH CHARITY FOUNDATION, BROOKLYN, N. Y. 



PREFACE. 




HE Church, in the dogmatic sense, is "a con- 
gregation of faithful men in which the pure 
word of God is preached, and the sacraments be 
duly administered/' This is the visible Church. 
It should be catholic— national — municipal ; able by the 
gentle forces of its own mere being to assert itself in the 
hearts of all men. And in the history of the world, banded 
by defences of external authority, it seemed at one time to 
realize the dream of early saints, and to sit the Queen of 
Nations. That vision has vanished from the face of the 
earth. Who, with his Bible alone in his hand, could de- 
termine whether it is ever again to be seen in this world ? 
Certainly it will not be in our time. Meanwhile the entire 
Christian world is agitated by the methods in which men 
would restore this visible unity. Externally it has degene- 
rated into a ceaseless wrangling and struggle of sects, and 
divisions of the organic body. 

This unity is twofold— that of a kingdom which is 
within— that of an organic, visible body, which is without. 
For the inner kingdom there is hope. Each man sees 
his own way to it. Each division of the common body 



iv 



PEE FACE. 



has its own interpretation of it. Of all others, the 
object of reverence with us — after the strong intention of 
the individual to seek the two virtues of piety and purity, 
is that which finds its round of graces and gifts in the 
family. It works from within outward. It begins with 
the heart and purifies the believer after the ideal of Christ 
in his relations to the members of his own home. It 
leaves him at his entrance on the street, a fully taught 
Christian, to show to other men and other families, the 
virtues and the manhood which he first learned within 
doors. The pool is formed by the rivulets which have 
been flowing from all the homes around. The parish 
church is the result of the truest and purest pieties which 
men have found within their households. 

Two ideas are met with as to the use and importance of 
religion. One commands the popular vote — the idea, that 
by either priest or preacher alone, (and they differ rather 
as to the manner of the communication, than as to the 
fact of it), the divine grace comes to the individual. It is 
represented as something superadded to nature — something 
objective, something to be had in this, and in no other 
way. It must come by the hand of the sacramentalist or 
by the tongue of the exhorter — either as a compendious 
regeneration, or a stupendous and quasi-miraculous con- 
version. It is not enough to point to either of these 
parties, the duty of the lowest of the servants of God — 
the power by authority to stand as a sign-post, a divinely 
appointed one, if you will, but one that is useful to point 
out to a traveller the way — leaving the traveller to walk in 
it, by such power as God has given him ; but the sign- 
giver must be of the last necessity, to communicate that 
strength, to insure that walking, and to substitute his 
gifts of profession for the only thing which at last endures 



PREFACE. 



v 



and avails — character. Religion is a superadded some- 
what. It is an opus operatum, whether from priest or 
preacher. The world has grown above the one scheme. 
It is fast outgrowing the other. 

The other and truer thought looks to the kingdom of 
God as always in its permanent forces within — something 
which enters into man as light into a dark room, removing 
the blackness and gloom, scattering the birds of evil 
omen, and the vile, insect, passion-idols, bringing in a 
truer life and a better hope— something, if superadded, 
yet absorbed and made identical with the recipient. In 
such a thought of religion all outer means are of avail only 
as they kindle the ray-power in the soul ; as they, by a 
second birth as against evil, give the soul its power over 
itself, and develope the real manhood of the Christian. 

These varying notions of the Christian system run into 
three channels. One, of God's work as only within, so as 
to deny any use of the means of grace. This is the Quaker- 
ism of widely different sects— the indifferentist on the one 
side, and the evangelical school on the other. Character is 
absorbed by the latter in election. The man is hidden 
under the robe of imputed righteousness. 

The second school look to a charmed circle of Church 
rites, now, lowly bowing to the usages of an ignorance 
which has had its day and done its work ; anon desiring 
the glittering bubble of some metaphysical ideal, as 
superstitious and more ephemeral than the other. All the 
way down to the backslider and the modern half-believer, 
character loses itself in the forms of profession. 

The third — and in the service of it, we offer the follow- 
ing Discourses— accepts the ordinances as in their way 
necessary to an end in the change of the mm— and neces- 
sary no longer. It holds that the one Sacrament which 



VI 



PBEFACE. 



underlies all Missions, which requires the actual hand of 
another man to baptize all creatures, and saves Christianity 
from degenerating into a mere philosophy, is passed by and 
forgotten * in the very sealing of a contingent covenant be- 
tween the creature and his God. So the Church utters the 
sound warning before the recipient turns from the font : 
4 6 Remember always that baptism represents unto us our 
profession, which is to follow Christ — be made like unto 
Him, to die to sin, and rise again unto righteousness. " 
The other Sacrament, which brings all men to an equality 
and destroys all human castes, whether of religion or race, 
forms the golden clue to the history of our present civili- 
zation. The priest is in this view like the High Priest of 
our profession, armed with power to bless, only, as like his 
Master he becomes the least of all and the servant of all. The 
Church is a divinely constituted means to the end of a sancti- 
fied manhood. Salvation is now found in being saved 
from that which de-humanizes man. The conscience, as 
it is developed under the daily life in the relations of the 
family, by the power of an endless life, shown by the Son 
of Man, is supreme. God is in us to will and to do — and 
the man willing and doing, is anointed with an unction 
from above. The household is the first Church, on whose 
vigor and purity all sodalities and voluntary societies 
depend ; and by reflection from it, are more or less true to 
the idea of Christ. 

How far we may have been faithful to this idea, the 
reader will judge for himself. We have not aimed so 
much at developing a system — as in defining the family 
ties and relations, under this leading idea. It may be 
easy to find faults and flaws. It may be as easy to accept 



* 4 ' Forgetting those things that are behind/ ' — St. Paul. 



PREFACE. 



vii 



the hints which are cast out, as leading one to a sounder 
view of the life we are living. God was once manifest in 
the flesh, as Jesus revealed to others the Divine in His 
own soul. He may be manifest in the family life now, as 
purifying the hearts of many men and leading them to a 
deeper unity of character, than sacramentarian or preacher 
can offer. Unity was once in Christ as light is in the full- 
orbed moon. It shines for us now over the troubled 
waters in a line of light crinkling and flashing on 
multitudinous surfaces of little waves, little churchlets and 
sects, all the way back through the darkness of earth to its 
primal source. May such light and such proofs of unity 
abound in many homes, and commend and ratify the 
Church of the Household. 

May the Spirit of holiness so mingle in the homes of 
those who listened patiently to these discourses, and of all 
others who give them a kindly thought, that it may reveal 
Christ in them, and fit their occupants, by imitation of 
Him, to meet His and our Father in peace. 

" The outward form is not the whole, 
But every part is moulded 
To image forth an inward soul, 
That dimly is unfolded." 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGS 

i. — Home, The First Covenant ... i 

ii. — Home, under the Old Covenant . .18 
m. — The Home of Jesus . . . . 35 

iv. — The Passion of Home . . . 56 

v. —Home Virtues ..... 72 
vi. — Marriage Honorable . . • . 91 

vii. — Unhappy Homes ..... 109 

viii. — Home Religion 126 

ix. — Husbands and Fathers .... 145 
x. — Homes.— The Mother . . . .161 

xi. — Sons at Home . . . . . 178 

xii. — Daughters in the Home , . . • 195 
xni. — The Education of Home . . . 212 
xrv. — The Duties of Masters .... 228 

xv. — The Unmarried in our Homes . . 246 

xvi. — The Sick in our Homes .... 262 

xvii. — Home as Preparing Man to Die . . 278 

xviii. — The Home in Rest . . . . -295 
xix. — Home — its Vacant Places . . ~ . . 311 



I. 

HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT. 

"For he looked for a city which hath foundations , builder 
and maker is God." — Hebrews xi. 10. 

BRAHAM was a representative man. In 
nothing was he more so, in my opinion, 
than in this fact, which is here recorded : 
in his always seeking for a home. I pro- 
pose his example to you at this time, as thus seeking 
that which, for wise ends, in the great lesson of 
God's revelation, he never found on earth. He 
never found it. He ran the two things of heaven 
and home into one, by the very fact of his disap- 
pointment. 

I. Let us catch the meaning of this writer, in the 
text. He knew his meaning well. He has in mind, 
as I read his words, some of the profoundest truths 




THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



of life. He says, " By faith? Just for the once, 
think of this faith of his as you think of that boy of 
yours who has gone out to California, to seek his 
fortune. He has gone in some sort of faith, I take 
it. As he grows homesick for all the softening in- 
fluences which he has left behind him, he has some 
sort of belief that upholds him in his loneliness. Say, 
it is nothing more than to make money to come 
home again. He thinks of somebody that stands 
behind the money, to make it worth the sacrifice of 
his best days in a far-off land, among strangers. 
Ah ! these hearts of ours are not cut out in card- 
board patterns that you can draw ink-lines across 
them, and keep all the agitations of any one passion 
in one particular spot, away from all the rest. He 
will make money, but he carries with him whither he 
goes, the passions and hopes of his life here. Soft 
dreams of a nobler future, that may be his reward, 
will stir him in the loneliest ranch, in the wildest 
sierra ; and he will claim that he is digging the hot 
earth for some treasures that are more precious to 
him than ingots of gold and silver. Now mark, I 
am not saying that Abraham had any of these ordi- 
nary, carnal notions. The dry polemists have set 
tied it, that it is too undignified for any one to have 
so much of the milk of ordinary human nature about 
him, if his name occurs in the Bible. We will leave 
him to himself, as having only great thoughts of the 
Nicene creed and the Saybrook platform : discuss- 
ing, as he went, only the doctrines of imputed right- 



HOME, THE FIB ST COVENANT. 



3 



eousness and the like. I asked you to accept our 
own boy, from whom we parted, with a heart-break, 
as having a faith of his own, on quite a lower plane, 
it is true, but still something like his. 

" By faith Abraham, when he was called to go 
out into a place which he should after receive for an 
inheritance, obeyed ; and he went out, not knowing 
whither he went" I seem to feel like being heretical 
to the orthodox belief, in which I was brought up, 
and to think that the writer is somehow thinking of 
the day when he once felt his own heart swelling in 
his bosom, as he saw the blue mountains of the Tau- 
rus range sinking out of his sight, and turned to hide 
the tear that would rise, as he looked forward toward 
the Syrian shores, with a heavy heart. True he was 
not going quite ignorant of "the whither he was 
bound ;" but he, as every man almost in the world, 
was seeking his fortune. He knew he was to meet 
his father's friend, the great Gamaliel, and to sit at 
his feet He was turning his face towards the sacred 
home of his race, and the temple of his God. But 
he never would have written these words if he had 
not known what it was to have that heart-sink at 
going he knew not whither. It is, I think, a beauti- 
ful thought that he has caught in the brief record of 
the life of the man Abraham. It throws the shadow 
of his grand life far down the centuries. It seizes 
the faith on its side of nature. We all hear that 
same call that God made to him. We too have 
God about us. Mean though our lives may seem, 



4 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



God is in them. We thought of anything else than 
of using the example of the patriarch for our com- 
mon purposes, when we made our start. But, it is 
the glory of this book, that it finds us out at every 
turn. Just as in nature, God here is always better 
than we think Him ; always doing us good. So — 
and would that we might realize it always — so 
here, the very foundation stone of a true faith was 
placed, in the history of a man doing just what we 
all have done or have to do in our turn ; to lift a 
loving mother's arms from our neck and hear the 
last counsels of a wise father, to leave the resting- 
places of childhood, and listen to the voice that calls 
to all the manhood that is in us, and go forth to seek 
a city that hath foundations.* He proceeds: " By 
faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a 
strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac 
and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise : 
for he looked for a city which hath foundations, 
whose builder and maker is God." I like the change 
of the word, that occurs in this passage. In the 
book of Genesis, it is always i a land/ that is pro- 
mised to Abraham. God always speaks to him of 
1 a land that I will shew thee.' The nearest approach 
to a city, is the old-time habit of pious men, that 
when he thinks he has reached it, he builds an altar, 



* " The family bond, though a conquest won by culture over the 
rudimentary state of man, and slowly, precariously acquired, has 
yet become a sure, solid, and sacred part of the constitution of human 
nature."— Mattheiv Arnold, God and the Bible, pp. 145-155. 



HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT. 



5 



and offers a sacrifice to Jehovah.* He and his child- 
ren were always ' heirs of a promise and none the 
less always wanderers from place to place : always 
seeking and never finding a home. As in childhood, 
we fancy a chase of the ever retreating rainbow, to 
find the fairy's bag of gold which lies at its foot ; so 
they are seen always pursuing a vision, which is 
never quite attained, on the earth. It is on this 
disappointment, this " aching void " that this same 
writer builds an argument for the necessity of a ful- 
filment of the divine promise, somewhere. As it was 
not fulfilled here, then where was it ? Faith in a good 
God said promptly, in an immortal life. " These 
all died in faith, not having received the promises, 
but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of 
them, and embraced them,f and confessed that they 
were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they 
that say such things, by their actions declare plainly, 
that they seek a country. And truly, if they had 
been mindful of that country from whence they came 
out, they might have had opportunity to have re- 
turned. But now they desire a better, that is an 
heavenly : wherefore God is not ashamed to be called 

* On reaching Sichem, in consequence of a vision confirming him 
in possession of the land, he built the first altar [Gen. xii. 6). Again 
another, between Bethel and Hai, (v. 8,) and a third at Hebron, 
(xiii. 1 8,) near which most of his life was passed. 

f Hebrews xi. 13-16. Embraced them, ddrtatfa/uevoi. The word 
is emphatic. Salutantes (Vulgate). Wordsworth explains it by jac- 
tare oscula (Tacitus,*) or basia (Juvenal,) to throw kisses towards one. 
It signifies the strongest natural yearning. 



6 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



their God: for He hath prepared them a city." 
What to them looking forward to the future, seemed 
to be a country, or patria, i. e. y a father-land ; to the 
Apostle, living so long after, was plainly a city, and 
as the event showed, the eternal city of the saints, 
whose builder and maker is God. It is to my mind 
a noble thought, which is contained in this passage 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews ; that the first great 
faith, that was destined to be the very protoplasm 
of all the future revelation, to lift men to the heights 
of religion, should be established by the providence 
of God, in the love of home * All sects and scholars 
claim Abraham as the father of the faithful. I point 
you to this peculiarity of his faith. It was the faith 
in a home, that was to be his by promise. If the 
promise was never to be realized in this life, if he 
was to have here no continuing city, it is perhaps 
none the less a striking similitude to our own truest 
hopes. They are all the better for us, when they 
are gained, if they are found to have been too bright 
to be realities here. The passion which springs up 
in a true heart for a home ' eternal in the heavens/ 
where there are no sorrowful defects, no sickness nor 
partings to wring the soul, may be the richest gift of 
divine grace to those who have been most faithful 

" He (Abraham) is not an ecclesiastic, not an ascetic, not even a 
learned sage, but a chief, a shepherd, a warrior ; full of all the affections 
and interests of a family, and household, and wealth, and power ; and 
for this very reason the first true type of the religious man, the first 
representative of the whole Church of God."— Dean Stanley, Hist. 
Jewish Church, Sect. i t p. 2 j>. 



HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT. 



7 



and most successful in their daily duties here. The 
best home may make us 6 home- sick' for a better 
life. 

I enjoy sometimes the thought, that in music, for 
instance, it is better to have the taste so cultivated, 
that no performance here can ever again satisfy it ; 
that the best that can be done for us, is to have it 
suggest for us the unending, because the exhaustless, 
song of Moses and the Lamb, in which the refined 
ear of the perfect saint shall hear every line of indi- 
vidual rejoicing and praise, as if sung in solo, and 
also have with it the swell of the full anthem, in 
which the roll of the planets shall be the undertone, 
and the innumerable hosts of exulting saints the tire- 
less chorus. Is it not so ? Is not the strongest testi- 
mony to our immortality, to be recognized in this 
power to feel ' a void, the earth can never fill ? ' 

We are all able to feel the truth of the text : " He 
looked for a city which hath foundations, whose buil- 
der and maker is God." In other words, he was 
always seeking to realize the common dream of us all 
alike, a home. Year after year, the man grew older 
in the search of it. The days of his early vigor pass- 
ed away, and it was not realized. He remonstrated 
with God, and said to him, in almost a bitter cry of 
his heart : " This Eleazar of Damascus is my 
heir." Then Isaac was given to him. " Ah ! " 
he says, " the vision is now come true." But God 
again came to him and tried him terribly. As the 
angel caught his hand, the aged servant of God 



THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



saw the meaning of his whole life, saw the end of all 
true faith, saw the day of Christ and was glad.* 
As the dreams of a home here on earth at last passed 
from before his eyes, the golden walls of the New 
Jerusalem rose on his sight. He thus becomes the 
example of all who have \ the like faith with Father 
Abraham/ 

II. What then is this vision ? what is home, to a 
true man ? 

Two sets of ideas call themselves our religion : one, 
the notion that all daily and common things are too 
mean and vulgar to be considered in thinking of God. 
It is the rough distinction of religions and secular. 
The other, that religion is in all mean and common 
things, a3 well as in the highest ; that faith is not hav- 
ing dreams of pure intellect in certain historical chan- 
nels, so much as in having a faith, which lets nothing 
be common or profane. One sort is like Peter, too 
pious to eat in his hunger, the objects placed before 
him, ' abundantly to enjoy/ but remonstrating with 
the Almighty : " I have never eaten anything com- 
mon or unclean/' The petulant creature is for the 
time more pious than the Creator. The other sort of 
religion is in sympathy with the voice that said to the 
scrupulous Jew, " What God hath cleansed, that call 
not t hou common/' On e set of thoughts puts a man's 

* " The union of parental love with the total denial of self, is held 
up in both cases (Christ's death and the offering of Isaac) as the 
highest model of human, and therefore as the shadow of Divine Love. 
'Sacrifice,' is rejected, but « to do Thy will, O God,' is accepted."- 
Dean Stanley, Hist, of Jewish Church, Sect. xi. p. 5 6. 



HOME, THE FIB ST COVENANT. 



9 



religion in something outside of his daily work. The 
other finds in his home the sacred altar, at which the 
real sacrifices of life are always being offered ; where 
the real growth in grace is to be sought. 

Home is the resting-place of the heart. It lies so 
exactly in the lines of all religious thought, that a man 
is bound to make it more or less one with his relig- 
ion. The ancients had their household gods. We 
Christians talk of the domestic altar. There are cer- 
tain convictions, which make Home the first of all 
temples to us. It is the original of the idea of a 
Church. God's people are his household.* 

The parish is the collection of all the families of a 
place. They are banded in one covenant, for certain 
purposes, and they meet for worship at certain times. 
But all the time and for all purposes they are in the 
covenant of Home. As the rills of the mountain 
steal out of every grassy nook, from every little dell 
and ravine in the side of it, and at last appear as a 
river in the valley, so the greatest nations and the pur- 
est churches are the sum of all the home-life of the 
people. The river may be clear as the Saco, or dis- 
colored as the sluggish Santee — it is always what the 
inland influences have made it. The Church is what 
the home-life of the individuals, in their families, will 
make it. Of course there may be exceptional fea- 
tures in it. There may be homes, in which every 
thing is out of place and discordant ; the father's in- 
fluence invaded by some stranger ; the mother's gen - 

* itarpid, Eph. in. 15. oikbioi, Eph. ii. 19. Gal. vi. 10. 



10 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



tie word of no power ; the rights of the elder chil- 
dren, kept in constant jeopardy and dispute ; and all 
done, under a plea of religion. 

Indeed, may I not suggest the fear that it is too 
much the case in the majority of our homes. Is it 
not true that we seldom think of home as the true 
place for the education of the conscience ? But I re- 
peat the remark, that as the homes are, in the main, 
such will be the Church. This community is in some 
things priest-ridden. Not in the old fashions nor by 
those calling themselves priests. But the want of the 
old arts does not remove the evil. So long as the 
main religion of a community is held to be any one 
act, or set of acts, in which the family can take no 
part, so long as the deep convictions of the soul by 
which it draws near to God, and in consequence of 
which it begins to live, are matters of ecclesiastical 
influence, independent of the voices of the family life, 
just so long, will it be true that we are, in a mild sense, 
priest-ridden. Your child of fifteen or twenty years 
of age goes out of a morning, according to this scheme 
of doctrine, a woe-inheriting sinner. He or she comes 
in at night, a soul at peace with God; converted, a 
" professor of religion," washed in the fountain of re- 
demption and forever saved. Now what have you to 
do with such change ? What has the family ? Noth- 
ing at all. You have been loving the child with all a 
father's love, or a mother's watchful tenderness — you 
have been educating it, as you supposed, with some 
sort of a scriptural promise, that if you brought it up 



HOME, THE FIRST COVENANT, 



I I 



in the way it should go, it would never leave it. But 
you find that such thoughts are all the " filthy rags 
of self-righteousness/' Your child's whole education, 
in the most important part of it, in the hope of accept- 
ance with God, from which all moral conduct flows, 
has been taken out of your hands, and given into the 
hand of its religious teacher. It has ' joined the 
church/ not as a consequence of its regular life from 
infancy ; not as a consequence of its moral education, 
as you have been leading it, but in spite of it. There 
is this immense break in our lives. Yea ! and men 
love to have it so.* 

Now, I ask it in sober sadness, is this necessary ? 
Is it the will of God ? Is it the faith of father Abra- 
ham, and of every other Bible-saint ? I think not. 
There is no power in the Church to come between 
the father and the child, that can in any way impair 
the unity of the education of the family. The first 
covenant is the home covenant. The first church 
that a man joins is the home church. He is born 
into a family, whose high-priest is consecrated, by a 
rite as holy as ever fell on human head. The appro- 
val of high heaven was given to Abraham ; because 
"he would command his children after him. ,, God, 
who loved him, left him under the tutelage of his 
own parents, until he had become a full-grown man. 
Then again he did not call him finally, until his 
father had died. But it is hardly necessary to multi- 

* I am a believer in the fact of conversion, as given in Scripture, 

as the exception^ and in the Catechism, as the rule. 



12 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



ply instances out of the Bible. It is written, in my 
way of reading it, on another scheme of life from 
ours. In the Bible, as in nature, home is the first 
church of the infant; the passage from it to any 
other, is by rule natural and easy. 

III. Let me show my meaning from the Prayer- 
book. We bring a child to the font to be baptized. 
There we confess, that it is ' by nature born in sin, and 
a child of wrath/ Pass, just now, what we mean by 
this language; it surely allows the need of some 
compensating blessing, to be sought in this way. 
Now a common sense of justice tells us, that if God, 
by any means, has held the infant responsible for the 
condition in which it is born ; he surely, if he has 
any confidence in a mother's love, to say nothing 
now of a father's, he surely will allow some way to 
set off against its condition by nature, some covenant 
state that may save our precious theology. Other- 
wise this happens. You are members of a church, 
into which you cannot bring your young children. 
You are in the fold. They are in the world. You 
are saved by a grace that has no room for them. 
And, to pass by all the rest, I emphasize this thought. 
You cut across all the natural powers of love in the 
family. How can you talk to your child of the 
duties of life? It is in 'the gall of bitterness/ If 
there is a break as wide as this between you, your 
hands cannot repair it; your tiny arms can never 
reach across its gloomy depths. What is a home 
where the father is obliged to pray always for the 



HOME, THE FIBST COVENANT. 



13 



future religious change of those he loves best? — 
where, in all the family life, at the morning prayers, 
at the daily question of duty, at the evening hour of 
separation, or in the dark days of sickness, there is 
always this fearful under-consciousness such a one 
has of a wily inherited disease in the blood. It 
is an awful gulf, between the members of the same 
household ! They may not often speak of it ; but 
it is never forgotten. How can it be ? They live 
on the edge of a precipice, where the cliffs go down 
sheer ten thousand feet, and the rocks below are 
" heaped with the damn'd like pebbles. " Of all the 
home-band the little infants seem the most in peril : 
and reverend scribes stand ever by, to see that no 
weak mother, like that one of old Greece, shall bare 
her white bosom and recall her child from the danger- 
ous edge, by the un-orthodox instincts of nature. 
This scheme has been tested in this community lately. 
Now for awhile true religion has to fear the .reaction. 
Every one of us has a personal interest in it. And 
in the interest of the truth, I recall you to the picture 
of the faith of the first of the leaders of the religious 
thought of the world. The older covenants held all 
the children in their sacred circle. That religion is 
the safest that begins with honoring home. The 
eloquent tongue of the appointed preacher in the 
church can open to us the knowledge of sacred things. 
It can never take the place of the father's authority. 
" The fear of the Lord is the beginning of know- 
ledge," says Solomon ; and it begins in the instruc- 



14 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



Hon of the father, and in the law of the mother. The 
priest may offer for us, in the larger assembly of the 
gathered community, the sacrifices of prayer and 
praise. In the private household, every man is the 
priest of his own family, and has no vicar. The altar 
of the house is as sacred as any altar on the earth. 
The prayer offered there rises with acceptance into 
the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. The daily conver- 
sion that goes on there in the little jars and battles 
for right and duty is that which makes the 
man. 

I close, with this one thought ; that it is worth every 
man's while to examine the foundation of his home- 
life. If I am not far out of the way, there is need of 
a greater regard for the sanctities of home. Honor 
father and mother, was the first commandment with 
promise. The promise is good yet. It adorns many 
a man with the jewels of graces, which, like amulets, 
keep off many a plague, unknown to him. But if 
father and mother and all the children, by mutual 
consent, attempt to transfer this honor to some other 
agency, call something else, their religion, and look 
for the grace of God exclusively, in some other place, 
I care not if it be fifty times a church, there is a 
wrong done to nature and to religion, that is not to 
be hidden. 

Religion began, yea, I believe it always begins in 
seeking that better city, whose image here is in the 
true home. Take, for example, a good boy, one 
who in the phrase of some, is a prodigy of early piety; 



HOME, TEE FIRST COVENANT, 1 5 

who in my opinion is a good boy, and Jesus loved 
boys, as boys, and said some emphatic things about 
them. In his innocence his home lies very near to 
heaven. If I try to tell him what the Church is, and 
keep to the Bible for my illustration, and forget the 
Thirty-nine Articles, for the time ; lo, the Church is 
his mother. He knows well enough what that 
means. He some how feels able to join a Church 
like that He can subscribe to its creed, every letter ; 
nor find a difficult mystery in it all. If I go on to 
tell him of the awful Being, who inhabiteth eternity, 
I can go to Sinai, to tell him of the reign of law. I 
can show him nature gathering there, to warn the 
sinner, of the fruits of all evil conduct ; I can make 
the darkness grow heavy to him, as he hides his 
head, at night, in the crib, with the thunders that 
rolled over the guilty cities of the plain ; but if I try 
to tell him of the good Being, into whose hands I 
myself hope to fall at last, the words of terror one 
by one pass away for the loving promises of the Son 
of Man. God is his Father. Every thought that he 
has a right to have of his father, he has a right to 
transfer to his Maker. Chiefly this one: if he trem- 
bles at the mystery of the divine nature, as tremble 
we all will at times, it is the image of his own father 
that comes into the mind. If you would tell him of 
Heaven, in Scripture idiom ; it is his home. That is 
the most sacred thing that he knows. It is the little 
pool of purest water, hid, it may be, in some nook, 
away from common sight ; but it is his home. There 



1 6 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the light of truths that never are felt but once, came 
to him. And as he looks into its pellucid depths, it 
has a purity of its own, and then it reflects heaven to 
him, as his eternal home, as nothing else can. You 
can teach those who are in your church at home, in 
this catechism, and no one else can do it Should 
we not believe, then, in our homes ? Should we not 
guard them from the unwise zeal of mistaken teach- 
ers ? Of all the fine arts, brethren, is there one that 
at all compares with this, of home architecture ? Is 
there any picture that you can hang on your walls, 
like these visions of the "land of far distances/' 
which men call heaven ? Is there anything worth 
living for, to compare with the old-time search of 
the inexperienced Patriarch, as he went out from his 
native land, not knowing whither he went ? He be- 
gan by seeking a country, which he never found here. 
He reached at last " a city with foundations/' of 
God's building. And strangely was it built. It was 
the Home that he had all along been seeking. It 
was the Home that he had all along been making for 
himself. Like the nautilus, we are building our homes 
out of the heart's life of every day. The revelation 
of a larger world will show, that in another scene, 
we open into larger chambers, but every whorl of 
the mystic whole, has continuous and symmetrical 
convolutions around the common axis ; that in a 
deeper sense than appears on the surface, home snd 
heaven are one. 



HOME, TEE FIRST COVENANT. 



The tissue of the life to be 

We weave with colors all our own, 
And in the field of destiny 

We reap as we have sown. 
Still shall the soul around it call 

The shadows which it gathered here, 
And painted on the eternal wall 

The past shall reappear. 



II. 



HOME, UNDER THE OLD COVE- 
NANT. 



Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain, that build it. 
Psalm cxxvii. i. 

[Mfl5] HE word ,l0USC lias a Peculiar use in the Old 
.fsf W% Testament. It means the family, rather than 
i/py \£ the abode. We see this use in the second 
—J table of the decalogue. The tenth com- 
mandment, bids us not to covet a neighbor's house, be- 
fore it speaks of his wife. At the time that it was 
given, the children of Israel had no houses. They 
were wanderers in tents, living as their ancestors 
Abraham and Isaac had done, and like them too, 
seeking a better country. The house was the family, 
especially the children. Many circumstances made 
the coveting of this sort, a sin easily besetting that 
people. The home, in the sense of the household, was 
the object of intense desire with them. I believe it is 
not too much to say, that they accepted the burden 
of the Mosaic law, as the regulator of the passion for 



HOME, UNDER TEE OLD COVENANT. 1 9 

home. The same use of the word is seen in the 
psalm: " Except the Lord build the house," means 
that the blessing of God is necessary to the comfort 
and continuance of a family. The co-builders are the 
parents: the materials are the living souls of chil- 
dren and servants. 

It may seem to some an easy thing to dispense with 
the idea of the Lord's care in the establishment and 
defence of a family. Just here is the point of differ- 
ence between a true religion and a false. The foun- 
dation-stone of the house is faith. It is not an arbi- 
trary faith; but that one faith, which is the reflex of 
the law of nature. To illustrate this, in a word : a 
parent, who educates a child now in any sort of faith 
which claims to be religious, sometimes wonders that 
the promise is not fulfilled, for him— that the child, 
when old, shall not depart from it. But he has never 
taken the trouble to examine whether the thing that 
he calls by so august a name, is the faith of nature, 
or was ever recommended to him by the God of 
nature. He took up his religion at hap-hazard. It 
was perhaps a new thing with him ; it offered him 
some doubtful advantages. He rushed at it. He 
fenced him in with prejudices. He closed the win- 
dows and shut out the light of conviction as to any- 
thing beside. He indulged in very doubtful expedi- 
ents to keep his sectarian isolation and maintain his 
infallibility intact. Now religion, as a practical thing, 
must be one and the same under all forms, in its last 
essence. If a man bring up his children in the natu- 



20 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



ral religion of good hygiene, as to their bodies, it is 
certain that the rule is, that when old they will thank 
him for it. 

The same is true of the moral nature. There 
is as much law in the one case as there is in the 
other. I do not say that there are the same laws, but 
the same amount of law. 

To manifest this, I offer to you some of the facts 
of the Old Testament, about the homes under the law 
of Moses. You will find on examination, that one of 
the purposes of that economy was to reveal the laws 
of home ; to tell men, who were in a condition of igno- 
rance, what it was to be ; how it was to be guarded ; 
and the intimate connection that exists always be- 
tween it and the temple. 

Religion has two chief objects. I. The right wor- 
ship of God. II. The right education of men. I am 
dealing now with only one of these objects ; the edu- 
cation of men. I mean their moral, and not their 
intellectual education. It will appear that the two 
objects of the law were always over-lapping, one on 
the other. They were like the two tables of stone. 
Both were guarded in the same mercy-seat, in the 
holiest recess of the temple. God dwelt in the tem- 
ple, just over the two, to keep watch and ward over 
both alike. 

I. The first fact, to which I call your attention, is 
this : the corner-stone of the home of a true Israelite 
was placed in his religion. Take the ordinary work- 
ing of all common life. Two persons have married 



HOME, UNDER THE OLD COVENANT. 21 



and set up their house. They begin a home, for them- 
selves. Now, the one curse of all the savage races 
of the world, in that age, was polygamy. It is the 
one original sin of nature. It was "the rock " out 
of which they were hewn ; " the hole of the pit out 
of which they were digged." It degraded all people 
then. It had made Egypt the abode of vices and 
demons, yea, and of diseases unnumbered ; and drags 
its slime over that unhappy continent of Africa to 
this late day. In polygamous countries, there is no 
such thing as a home, save by exception. The de- 
gradation of woman, is the prime necessity of the 
system. The Israelites certainly had no knowledge 
of any better system. They were to be educated 
into one. Their low state of morals compelled 
Moses to wink at certain abuses in their conduct. 
They certainly started at the lowest point. Their 
first models were failures here. Now see how 
they were educated by their laws, into better 
thoughts. 

In the first place the crime of adultery, and es- 
pecially that of the married woman, as- it always 
should be, was made detestable, by all manner of 
punishments, human and divine. If she was found 
guilty of it the penalty was death. Her neighbors 
joined to inflict it. If she perjured herself to conceal 
her sin, the poor wretch was forced to accept her 
condemnation, in a manner too horrible to be de- 
scribed here. Now notice, please, that I am only 
looking to one point ; hozv the race zvasto be educated, 



22 THE OHUROH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



in the first principles of a home. The sine qua non 
of such a thing is the chastity of woman. Without 
that, there is no such thing possible. You may pat- 
ter about the equality of the sexes. It will not re- 
move one iota of the fact ; that the jewel of every 
home, the palladium, whose presence guards it from 
destruction is the purity of the wife. That of the 
husband is another matter. It has its own reward 
and penalty. But nature, law and history have one 
common testimony in this matter. 

So much for this side of the educational system of 
Moses. It was a stern, you may think, a savage 
teacher. When you find the laws of nature any 
more gentle, it will be time enough to fault it. I be- 
lieve that it was simply a reproduction in revelation, 
of the laws that are now working in every man's 
own experience. 

2. Now look at a pleasanter side of the matter- 
The hope of the world's redemption was involved in 
the purity of the Israelitish race. The promise of 
Eden was made to the woman. The promise which 
made the Israelite the covenant-child of God, was 
the Messiah, who was to be born of the tribes in 
the order of nature. Thus the greatest of curses and 
the greatest of blessings were alike held up before 
the mind of the faithful servant of Jehovah, to stimu- 
late his faith and to make the retreats of his home 
sacred. 

At the settlement of Palestine, as soon as the tribes 
began to have permanent abodes, the most of the 



HOME, UN J) EE THE OLD COVENANT. 23 



law-cases, so to speak, were on points relating to this 
matter. Before and up to the time of Isaiah, the 
promise of the Christ-man was held in generalities. 
After his time, it was still possible to read his great 
prophecy of the Messiah, without much straining of 
the word : " Behold a young wife shall bear a son 
whose name shall be the mighty God." This method 
of partial clearness in the promises certainly held up 
to every woman's mind the necessity and the favor 
with God of a chaste monogamy. 

3. One thought more on this important matter. 
The religion of Moses made the sin of idolatry, in 
which a man was unfaithful to Jehovah, the synonyme 
for the sin of infidelity in the wife. And their history 
is a curious study, in tracing the means by which 
the two sins were made utterly detestable. One 
ruins the home. The other ruins the nation. One 
brought every misery and contempt on the single 
family. The other sent all the families in the nation 
into bondage, and gave their fair city to be the pos- 
session of the owls and satyrs. The two helped the 
moral teaching of the people. As they became more 
religious, they became purer at home : as they gained 
blessings at home, they became sounder in national 
life. Now to come back to the two persons whom I 
fancied as setting up their home, — the lover-time of 
married life, with them and with us all is a season of 
peculiar trust, not only in each other, but in the con- 
tinuance of the softer faiths of innocent hearts. A 
little spice-gale of Eden is still perhaps allowed to 



24 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



float out of the cherub-guarded gates, which imparts 
to this one moon of early married life its romantic 
lustre. If there be one single idea which is then 
uppermost, it is that of fidelity to each other. It is 
an idea that gives its grace to our highest concep- 
tions of religious grandeur — as St. Paul showed in 
willingly confusing his precepts about married duties 
and " Christ and the Church." You can then ima- 
gine the gratitude to the law-giver who had thus 
guarded their homes for them. They were being 
educated in the great laws of life and civilization. 
Whatever may have been the sins of the nation as a 
whole, there were happy homes among the tribes, 
which owed their being to these laws of Moses. 
More than that, we who have inherited the Gospel 
from the Jews, owe them the laws and customs, 
which now consecrate home for us. It is the dream 
of the fanatic, that these ideas, which we live by, 
are the teaching of each man's private genius. They 
descended to us, from that education of the centuries 
before Christ. They were incorporated in the very 
rudiments of the Gospel scheme, in order that they 
should not be left again, to the changes of unaided 
reason . 

I. The religious education of the children, was left 
mostly to the family. It is fashionable, with certain 
classes of Christians, to rather despise the laws of 
Moses, as the temporary and arbitrary expedients of 
a carnal and rude system of thought. They forget, 
that in its great outlines, that economy was the simili- 



HOME, UNDER THE OLD COVENANT. 2$ 



tude of things seen by him in the Mount of God. In 
other words, he saw the things of the unchanging 
truth, and was commanded to incorporate them 
visibly in symbols and ordinances. Hence, if this be 
the real view of his work, we have in the law, the 
shadow of the Gospel : that is, if we find an expres- 
sion of God's will in the one, we are to expect its 
answering line of will in the other. In two things, 
this remark will be found useful. 

II. Every child of a family in Israel was as much 
in covenant with God as the parents were. As 
the one great expectation of the nation, was the 
coming of a King, in the order of nature, the rite of 
the covenant kept all of them in mind of that hope. 
It was the covenant 'of circumcision. It was the 
covenant made with children. It was received by 
every male child, on the eighth day of his life, on 
pain of excision from the commonwealth of Israel, if 
it was neglected. Passing all else that it may have 
meant, I turn to a single idea, which all of you can 
see was in it. The child, though born in sin, as ours 
are, was always under one covenant-consciousness 
and education. Suppose a traveller should tell us, 
that on the coast of Labrador, there was to be found 
now a tribe of people, who had this singular custom. 
Whenever a child was born, they took it and cast it 
out into the cold and ice of their horrid winters; 
and then gathered together in their snow-huts and 
gave thanks to God for the child, and joined in 
prayer that at some future time He would mercifully 



26 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



accept tke homage of the frozen urchin and restore 
him to life and make a man of him. Do you say the 
notion is simply monstrous ? It is. Hardly less so 
is the dogma of original sin in Christian sects, if it is 
removed from the twin dogma of the divine accept- 
ance of our infants, immediately after their birth, or 
ever they begin to sin. That we are born out of 
health in soul, is as certain as that we are born in- 
heritors of death in the body. We cannot give that 
up. But to accept it, in its verity ; and at the same 
time to allow that a child is compelled to grow up 
to man's estate, before we can feel that it is just as 
much in covenant with God as we are, is to my 
mind, the parallel custom of the tribe of the coast of 
Labrador, to which I have referred. It is monstrous. 
It is against nature, against reason. It must con- 
demn any system that allows it. If men do not feel 
it to be a curse, it is because nature is milder than 
logic : because the orthodoxy of the heart is tri- 
umphant over the heresy of the head. In the case 
of the law, there was nothing of this frightful error. 
The child was in the covenant y as much as his father. 
At twelve or thirteen he merely went to the temple 
and accepted his place in the nation. There was no 
break in the covenant-consciousness. In the home 
of the Israelite, there was never the horrid fear of a 
mother, as she lay awake at night ; " Will my son 
ever hereafter be a child of Jehovah ? Will he some 
years hence, when he grows up to be a man, be con- 
verted and join the synagogue? Will my daughter 



HOME, UNDER THE OLD COVENANT. 27 



be ever saved by grace, when she becomes a 
woman ?" No ! as the shades of night gathered 
over their home, and the sense of weakness came 
over them, as it will over all, the wolf and the hungry 
lion might howl around them, and seek what they 
might devour, and the satyr and the jin might shriek 
in the night- winds to daunt them with superstitious 
terrors, but no thought of the Lord their God ever 
lent its horror to their fears. They had their own 
distrusts and anxieties about their children, but it 
was not a part of their religion to exaggerate them, 
by self-inflicted torments. Their children were with 
them in the same ship, and took the same share of 
their temporal and spiritual fates, whatever they 
might be. The priest and the scribe could not in- 
terfere there. The child was put into the covenant 
generally, with the assent of the congregation of 
their neighbors, it is true ; for it was a national rite, 
but, by the father's right, and by the mystery of the 
mother's pains. They had not learned to glorify 
God for a religion that separated father and child by 
dogmatic perplexities, for half their lives. We have. 
Alas ! that it is so ! 

II. The common covenant rite of the religion that 
came to Moses from God, was the act of sacrifice. It was 
emphatically, a family rite, a social rite.* There was 

* " No trace of an hereditary or caste priesthood meets us, in the 
worship of the patriarchal age. * * * The chief of the family, as 
such, acted as the priest. The office descended by birthright, and 
might apparently be transferred with it*"— Smith, Die, Art. Priest. 



2 8 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



no such thing then, as now is very common. No one 
member of a family then* could, so to speak, get on 
into his own particular life-boat, and put on his own 
peculiar apparatus, for self-preservation, and claim a 
religious isolation for himself. Of course, I take it 
for granted that men and boys differed then as they 
do now. I am speaking to the single point of the re- 
ligious education of their homes. You may object 
that " they had no spirituality." Did David have 
none ? He was a very sound Israelite. We use his 
poems and hymns still. They show great spirituality. 
He knew how to commune in his chamber with his 
God, and have his repentings turn within him. I 
claim that they were men, just as we are, and that 
we are men as they were. I delight at seeing a 
family now, all in the same church of God. I do 
not mean just now all in one denomination even ; 
but, one, in which the horrid question of the eternal 
damnation of any orderly member of the same house- 
hold is not the sore spot under all" their lives. I 
hesitate not to say, that there are schemes of piety 
in vogue among us, that make it as hard as possi- 
ble to be at peace with God. By that cause very 
many families are divided. It is in such cases, as if 
the parent should bring home a statue of heroic size, 
and command all the children to stretch themselves 
dailv, until thev should grow to its hugeness, on 
pain of his eternal displeasure, so long as they did 

offering by the head of the family disappeared. 



HOME, UNDER THE OLD COVENANT. 



not reach its size. I warn you/ that the reaction to 
this mode of religious thought has begun already in 
our country. The meaning of some things which 
have been going on around us this winter, is, that 
the opposite extreme of laxity is beginning to make 
head. But take, for illustration, a family, as it is 
likely there were many in Judah; say, for instance, 
the household of Jesse. See how sacrifices were 
teaching them. Some May morning, he calls the 
household together, under the shade of the trees, 
and announces to all that he has been dissatisfied 
with the discords and jars of the family. No ser- 
vant or shepherd is left out : how can they be ? Is 
there ever a family religion in which all the members 
do not take part, in all that goes on for good or ill ? 
The head of the honse discourses of the duties of 
each, he brings up the sins of each, that affect all. 
He tells of the pardoning love of the God of his 
fathers. He checks Eliab for his overbearing tem- 
per towards his brothers. He warns David, it may 
be, of the dangers of pride. He does what a good 
father can well do in all times. He restores peace 
and amity among all. Having done this duty, he 
takes the chosen animal and goes to the tabernacle 
to offer his atoning sacrifice for the sins of the house- 
hold of Jesse the Bethlehemite. All take part in the 
offering. All accept the duties and receive the ad- 
vantages of his action. The absent are not forgotten. 
The religion of his people is a household religion. 
His home is made sweeter by his gift. The bands 



30 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



of home-life are bound tighter by the deed of sacri- 
fice. They sleep the better for the sprinkling of the 
blood of the lamb on the altar of Jehovah. It was 
a home religion. It taught all to reverence the pa- 
rents and in them to learn to reverence God, who 
was the great Father of them all. 

To conclude : there was one other element in the 
Hebrew faith, which, I believe, is not denied to the 
Christian religion. There was no promise of immor- 
tality in the Pentateuch. Its promises were realized 
here. If a man kept the law he should be rewarded 
by it on earth. In other words, the law was the 
chart of this voyage, which you and I are now 
making. It points out the quicksands and the whirl- 
pools, that lie in the way of all of us alike. If one 
would make it the man of his counsels, it would keep 
him in the way of health, peace and long life. I 
seem to hear the Apostle saying the same of the 
Gospel, when he tells us that " godliness is great 
gain, having the promise of this life and of that 
which is to come," At any rate I am not disposed 
to grant the Jew any advantage over us in this mat- 
ter. Now think of the promises which were made 
to a pious Israelite, under the law. The great heart 
of Moses seems to have swelled with the mighty 
theme, as he bent himself to the pleasing task of 
telling the blessing of the good and pious servants of 
Jehovah, in the long future before them, after he was 
gone. "And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt 
hearken diligently to the voice of the Lord thy God, 



ROME, UNDER THE OLD COVENANT. 3 1 



to observe to do all his commandments, which I 
command thee this day : that the Lord thy God will 
set thee on high above all nations of the earth : and 
all these blessings shall come upon thee, and overtake 
thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord 
thy God." Then follow the list of blessings of happy 
homes, till even the ground should seem to testify to 
its sympathy with the culture of a wise and tempe- 
rate race. The psalms are pastoral lyrics on this 
theme. No one is more to the point than the one 
following that in which the text occurs. Imagine 
how it sounded, when it was rolled forth by the ten 
thousands of Israel, standing on the steps of the 
temple, and believing in a God who thus made his 
people happy. It was a Song of Degrees, that is, a 
song of the temple steps, as the tribes came up to 
worship. " Blessed be every one that feareth the 
Lord ; that walketh in His ways. For thou shalt eat 
the labor of thine hands : happy thou, and well is it 
with thee. Thy wife is as a fruitful vine by the sides 
of thy house: thy children like olive-plants round 
about thy table. Behold, thus shall the man be 
blessed that feareth the Lord. The Lord shall bless 
thee out of Zion : thou shalt be the good of Jerusa- 
lem all the days of thy life. Yea, thou shalt see thy 
children's children, and peace upon Israel. ,, 

Were they happier than we are in the possession 
of these promises ? I think not. Does the Gospel, 
in lifting our thoughts to the future home of the 
saints, refuse us any one of the good things of the 



32 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



ancient people of God ? I think not. We too may 
form in procession and sing this Song of Degrees in 
the porch of any Christian Church. Or if we cannot, 
the fault is in ourselves, and not in the promises of 
the Son of Man, whose knowledge of life was learned 
in the home of a peasant of Nazareth. 

I have heard a learned professor of science say, 
that in his judgment, the nations of the world will at 
last find the metric measure, which they must adopt 
to be the cubit of the ancient tabernacle. Of that I 
am no judge. But I would have you, my brethren, 
whose homes act on mine, as mine does on yours,' 
try this cubit of the tabernacle in their adjustment. 

I. Measure the relative duties of man and wife by 
it. The heresy of the day, that is in my judgment, 
'damnable,' is that which makes the marriage tie,' 
the sport of our wild winds of passion and the jargon 
of fantastic theorists. It is the idolatry of Astarte, 
the foul queen of the Sidonians brought back again! 
Alas, what home can be pure, in the flow of outward 
defilement, that runs in the sluices of every news- 
paper that one takes up ? The adulteress of old was 
stoned, by an avenging community. Every man 
took a hand in it. Ah ! how savage in me not to 
shriek over such inhumanity ! I do not shriek, on 
either side; certainly not, to revive any such law 
now. But, if I saw a man deliberately sending cloth- 
ing which he knew to be innoculated with the plague 
into a peaceful community, I would not break my 
heart, if they should hang him as high as Haman. 



HOME, UNDER THE OLD COVENANT. 



And no plague of earth is more accursed of heaven, 
than this. 

It is said that the pope has made the Virgin Mary 
the patron-saint of these United States. It is very 
kind of him, to deprive Italy and Rome of her 
sen/ices. But would that Protestants and Catholics 
alike would keep her in mind, in our war with all 
impurity. May the thoughts of that innocent heart 
be the queen-thoughts of our homes. It is a cult of 
which we cannot have too much. 

II. Let us establish our homes on the foundation 
stone of the faith, that they are the real educational 
institutions of the moral and religious life. If it is 
the will of God, that we, the elders, are to kneel daily 
and thank him for his mercy in saving us from hell, 
and then with a sigh, to think of our darlings, as in 
the gall of bitterness, beyond our reach or help : 
beyond the reach of the logic of the appointed teach- 
ers of Zion ; waiting for adult consciousness, before 
they can have hope of God's favor, let us bow the 
head, and bear it as we can. But if it is, in a way, 
only going back to repeat the old-time idolatry of 
Molech, then let us not bow to it, nor in any way 
give it place, no, not for a moment. Mark, I am not 
insisting on any one form of dogma. I am demand- 
ing of the theology of the Church, that it be at least 
as merciful as Judaism was, and keep our families 
unbroken, at least, as long as time leaves them so ; 
in other words, that we hear the voice of nature 
re-echoed in our Church faith. With all such helps, 



34 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



our homes may still be to us schools of sorrowful 
experience, for we have here no continuing city, any 
more than Abraham had. We too seek one to come, 
which hath foundations. But, in our sorrow, we 
shall find better comforts, than we can have in 
ill-guarded homes now. May the Lord so build the 
house that our co-operative labor may not be in vain 
in the building. May He keep the city, for after we 
have done all, He alone can keep it. It is vain for 
you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of 
sorrows; for so — that is in guarding this city and 
guiding this building — He giveth His beloved sleep. 



III. 



THE HOME OF JESUS. 

" And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was 
subject to them : but His mother kept all these sayings in her heart. — 
St. Luke, ii. 51. 

HE home of Jesus, if we could see it as it 
was, would doubtless excite something of 
the enthusiasm of the devotee for the shrine 
of his adoration. At first thought it pro- 
bably suggests to you nothing that can be in any 
way satisfactory. The veil of oblivion has fallen 
over it. The effort to recall it by the help of any 
sound data that remain, would be vain. Apparently, 
Providence has aided the process of oblivion, in this 
direction. It is strange on any other theory than 
that of a supernatural guidance, how this writer, 
Luke, could have summed up the story of eighteen 
years of the life of his chosen model in the few words 
of the text. I can often comprehend the motive of 
an objection to what Luke has said, but I cannot 
see how the silences in his story can be explained by 
any consistent canon of skeptical criticism. He is 




36 TEE CHURCH OF TEE HOUSEHOLD. 



telling ' in order ' the things which were most surely 
believed among Christians about the life of Christ, 
and he drops out of the order the period which must 
have been as interesting in the instance of Jesus, as 
of other men. In this he is without a parallel among 
Jews or Gentiles. 

This blank, uninspired writers labored to fill up. 
Many of the stories that come to us from the dark 
recesses of legendary lore in the ancient Church, are 
highly respectable. If they are not authentic, we 
are rather inclined to regret it. We wish to believe 
them, even when we are compelled to allow that 
there is little or no ground for doing so. For ex- 
ample, the legend was current that when the holy 
family were fleeing into Egypt from fear of Herod, 
they were attacked by a band of robbers, two of 
whom were the men who afterwards were crucified 
with Christ ; and that even then, in that early adven- 
ture, they manifested the same difference of disposi- 
tion, which marked their conduct on the cross. The 
legend is one of the stories, which, as it were, filled 
in the outlines of the brief account of the Gospels, 
and which were invented in scores, bv the lovino- 
simplicity of the rude Christians of the Primitive 
Church. As we too often feel the meagreness of 
these outlines of the inspired story, we are tempted 
to wish that something more of spontaneous credit 
would attend these supplementary additions. But in 
the case of the childhood of Jesus, it is hardly too 
much to say, that all the legends, which would gene- 



THE HOME OF JESUS. 



37 



rally help us in such matters, are not only paltry, 
but are sometimes positively immoral. They are 
after the manner of pre-Raphaelite paintings, quaint 
burlesques often of their subject. When they occur 
in the midst of documents that are claimed as vera- 
cious, by parties in the Church, they help to give the 
air of weakness to more serious matters. Nothing is 
more emphatic to my own mind, of the truth of the 
inspiration of the four Evangelists, than their entire 
freedom from the puerilities of imagination, in which 
some of the primitive Christians revelled. This re- 
mark applies not only to the written legends and 
apocryphal gospels which have come down to us, but to 
some of the statements of the men, whom, from their 
early appearance, we call the Fathers. The imam- 

o 

nation was true to their Oriental blood and training. 
It was both vivid and credulous. Lay down any 
one of the inspired Gospels, and take up one of 
these apocryphal writings, and you have passed at 
once from the ground of solid, sober reason, into the 
region of the Arabian tales. We delight in the saints 
and martyrs of the first bitter days of the religion 
which they nobly kept for us. But it is not the 
delight of affectionate respect for the vividness of 
their imaginations. 

A few instances will show my meaning clearly. 
The Arabic gospel of The Saviour' s Infancy is perhaps 
the most open to these criticisms. It is a compila- 
tion, from some books which were probably in use 
at a very early date. It states that this story was 



38 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

found in the book of Joseph the high- priest, who 
lived in the time of Christ. It tells us, that the 
infant Jesus, lying in the cradle, said to His mother : 
" I am Jesus, the Son of God, the Logos, whom thou 
hast brought forth, as the angel Gabriel announced 
to thee ; and my Father hath sent Me for the salva- 
tion of the world." Again: the ' lady Mary' pre 
sented to one of the wise men, who came out of the 
East, a portion of the clothing of the infant He 
took it back with him to his own land of the Parsees 
or fire- worshippers. All the great men of the country 
came together, and made a feast. They light a fire 
and worship it, according to their custom. They 
throw the linen cloth into the fire, as a religious offer- 
ing. The fire burns down ; and they " took out the 
swathing-cloth exactly as it had been before, just as 
if the fire had not touched it." On the flight of the 
Holy Family to Egypt, astonishing miracles attended 
their progress. They reach a city where is a famous 
idol. At once the city is moved with extraordinary 
excitement. The chief men throng the temple to 
learn the cause of this agitation. The idol speaks, 
and informs them, that ' a God has come secretly 
among them/ And then, to their horror, it fell down 
and perished. In another town they come on a 
wedding party, in which the bride is dumb. On her 
kissing the infant Jesus her speech is suddenly re- 
stored. Afterwards, the work informs us, our Lord 
did 'many great miracles in the three years that 
he remained in Egypt/ 



THE HOME OF JESUS, 



39 



If it were only stories of this sort, which are rather 
interesting for their pious simplicity, we might rest 
content with them. But, even as divines have often, 
in more logical ways, perverted the spirit of the 
gospel by their reasonings, so these legends are open 
to more serious charges. They misrepresent the 
truth. They tell us, that when he was seven years 
old, Jesus, in play with other children, made images 
of various animals in clay. He then amazes the 
other urchins, by commanding them to live. They 
fly or run away in the sight of all the boys. The 
parents of the other boys taboo him as a wizard. 
Not long after this a skeptical boy offends him in his 
play. He uses his power to slay the child on the 
spot. We read that he does not allow his father 
Joseph to work hard ; but stretches out his hand 
towards any job, which is too much for his genius, 
and the article which is desired comes into shape, of 
itself. At twelve, He explains to a learned scholar ; 
" physics, and metaphysics, hyperphysics and hypo- 
physics," with all other kinds of science. Un- 
fortunately, the historian had not the wit to properly 
retain and commit to writing this valuable information, 
or we had been spared many troubles since. This 
learned discourse occurred in Jerusalem, and was a 
part of the three days' occupation of the boy Jesus, 
when He was lost from the company of His parents. 
It is natural, therefore, to contrast all this with the 
very sober and common place record of the 
Evangelist In that record, Jesus made no useless 



40 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



display of his power, wrought no revenge on his in- 
jurious enemies, and taught directly no physics or 
hyperphysics. I repeat the remark, that it is a 
strong proof of the restraining hand of some One far 
greater than any mortal man, which is seen in the 
silence of the writers of the four gospels. If miracles 
are useful to build up moral life, they may be 
analyzed freely. They should never offend against 
morality as it is taught by their ideal. If miracles 
are to give testimony to a messenger from God, the 
story in the gospels does that, and no more. Some- 
how/ the Evangelists and only they knew just where 
to stop. Who taught them, and taught no one else, 
Christian, Jew, or Pagan of that credulous age ? 

We turn to the scene of the text. 

Mary, after her three days' search, found Jesus in 
the temple, sitting among the doctors, " both hearing 
them and asking them questions.'' Do you say, that 
he was doing some miraculous work ? The gospel 
leaves you to say it of your own mind. It is not 
there. Do you fall on your knees in wondering 
admiration of " God manifest in the flesh," and 
attribute this to the Omniscience of the Deity rather 
than to the untaught simplicity of a pure child-wisdom 
in the peasant boy which touches the 1 traditions ' of 
the elders with the spear of Ithuriel, and shows 
them to be false and mean. 14 Out of the mouths 
of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength." 
Is it not possible for excessive orthodoxy of 
creed to overshoot the mark and reach the 



TEE EOME OF JESUS. 



41 



same results as superstition — that is a willing, in 
place of a necessary ignorance ? Christ was perfect 
man, and it is the pure innocent boy to which I 
would now direct your thoughts. For myself, I do 
not doubt, that he was a perfect boy, and had in him 
at this time the spirit to ask questions and to make 
replies, which in the line of our common hu- 
manity, are always astonishing, when we meet 
them in pure children. It says that all the 
rabbis were amazed at his understanding and 
answers. Well they might have been. They had 
the habit of being so. They never were cured of it. 
Wrapped up in the folds of their traditions and cor- 
ruptions of the law, it was the simplest thing in the 
world, to amaze them. Such rabbis never fail to be 
amazed. Men become enchanted by the pride and 
pomp of power, and sleep on the posts of duty. 
They cover up the word, and like Eli, say to their 
wicked sons, who are fattening on their immunities, 
"Nay, my sons, nay!" and the Samuels — who 
come to tell them that God is calling them — 
always do amaze them. It is well for us all 
to note it. But the simplicity of which I spoke, 
is seen in this manner of telling the tale. He 
" amazed " the great men of his nation. He none the 
less turns back at the will of His mother, though He 
showed her that he knew His true place to be in His 
own Father's house.* He turned his back willingly 

_ • It seems certain that the form of the words, which in the original 
is by roil zov ilarpo'S-in my Father's - means to convey to 



42 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



on such scenes and went with them to Nazareth, and 
was subject unto them for eighteen long years more. 

During that time I look for the home of Jesus. 
Unlike all common men in his teachings, He alone 
always spake of His home in heaven, as always 
present to Him. He went to it in due time, for the 
good of others, but for Him there was always this 
double, or rather this higher consciousness of the 
presence of God, which distinguished Him from all 
other men. He revealed this to Nicodemus : " No 
man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came 
down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in 
heaven." He has left no records directly of His 
thoughts of His home on earth. It was none the less 
true that our generalizations are as just on that as on all 
other points. If the transient has not been revealed, it 
was none the less genuine. If monks and severe think- 
ers would cast discredit on earthly joys, we choose to 
reject their conclusions, and see in this same method a 
sweeter logic and truer induction. It is possible 
to get at some of the main characteristics of 
the home of Jesus without the aid of legends. 
It was certainly a home in the ignoble hamlet 
of Nazareth. It was a home of contented pov- 
erty. It was a home of pious rustics. It was the 
home of a humble, uneducated mechanic. 

Nazareth was a small village of Galilee, and is still 



the mind of the Virgin, the idea that Jesus knew the story of His 
birth. It may be translated either, My Father's house, or, My Fath- 
er's business. 



THE HOME OF JE^US 



43 



very much the same as it was then. It was like any of 
the small towns lying on the hills to the north or east 
of us. There are three kinds of homes ; one, the life 
in cities ; the next the life in solitary farm houses ; 
the third, that in villages. Most of you have had a 
personal knowledge of all three. For twenty-six years 
of His life Jesus dwelt in the village, seeing the same 
people, and accepting the lowly conditions and laws of 
such a life. They educated him 1 in favor with God and 
man.' Who here that has any pleasant recollections 
of boyhood, does not find his mind going off to 
sketch the conditions of such a life. Xo matter 
where it is spent, the chief laws of human nature are 
the same in all men. If Jesus grew in wisdom as in 
age ; in other words, if he was a real boy, Ave can 
look at Him as such. We may judge him by the 
common laws of boys ; in some things the boy is always 
one and the same. He is not yet rubbed down to 
one common measure of the busy world, as men are. 
He has an outlook of his own. Put your divine and 
doctor and man of business together, and they can 
all go back of any distinctions that they have grown 
into, and recall the early time, before they knew or 
cared for anything of the kind. The play-ground, 
the woods, the swimming-place, under the shade of 
the willows, the orchard, the trout-brook, the breezy 
hill-top, from which they could look off to distant 
blue mountains, these were possessions that were 
theirs. They educate us, they live with us till the 
last things. 



44 TEE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



Nazareth had its own claim to be the boyhood 
home of Jesus. It lies among the hills of the south- 
ern ridges of Lebanon, just where they sink down 
into the plain of Esdraelon. It is in a valley running 
in a wavy line, east and west, about a mile long, and 
a quarter of a mile broad. The hills that shut it in 
are about four or five hundred feet high, with rounded 
tops of glittering limestone, sometimes ' white-hot in 
the burning sun,' but diversified by the shade of fig 
trees and olives, and by the fields of waving grain. 
The hollyhock and the oleander grew wild there. 
Hedges of cactus divided the few enclosures from 
each other. The fruit of the pomegranate, orange, 
fig and olive probably exercised the virtue of the 
boys then, as you and I can remember, other fruits 
did the same for us, in the long time ago. Small, 
solid stone-houses, narrow streets, and in the rainy 
season, fearfully muddy ones, make up the picture. 
In the map of my recollections of boyhood there are 
two prominent objects of nature, which never fail to 
come up to my memory ; the running brook, and 
the hill-top. A little rivulet ran down through the 
basin or meadow land on which the village of 
Nazareth stood. But the view from those hills — may 
we dare to see the son of Mary standing on one of 
the highest of them, growing in wisdom ; opening 
his great eyes with wonder and looking off to the 
scenes around him ; beginning his wisdom where ours 
began, in childish wonder, at all the things which he 
saw. As he stood there, if he looked to the north, 



THE HOME OF JESUS. 



45 



the peaks and ridges of the great mountain chains of 
Lebanon rose one above another, farther and farther 
away, to where snowy Hermon,the monarch-mountain 
of all Coele-Syria rose in imperial majesty, the pride 
of the land. In the west, the long ridge of Carmel 
stretched away, until it bathed its mantle in the blue 
waters of the Mediterranean. The great sweep of 
the bay of Akka was in sight, with its shore line of 
white sand. Southwards, lie the broad plain of 
Esdraelon, and beyond it the mountains of Samaria, 
with that sacred hill of Tabor, on which He will yet be 
glorified. The villages of Galilee dot the landscape 
on every side; and the boy recalls the tales of his 
mother of the heroes of his race as he looks towards 
Gilboa, Endor or Taanach. The whole landscape is 
said to be, " most beautiful and sublime;" and the 
book from which I have been quoting, has this com- 
ment : " It is easy to believe that the Saviour, during 
the days of his seclusion in the adjacent valley, came 
often to this very spot and looked forth from thence 
upon these glorious works of the Creator which so 
lift the soul to him." One place in or near the vil- 
lage itself, is marked as having interest for us. It is 
the fountain in the north-eastern portion of the village 
now of course by immemorial tradition, called The 
Fountain of the Virgin ! The well-worn path still 
leads to it. Of the identity of this spot, I believe 
there can be no doubt. We can see the poor mother 
as she walks along this lowly path, bearing her pitcher of 
water upon her head, and her boy running at her side. 



46 THE CHUBCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



We can fancy all that has happened to us, if it was 
natural and innocent, as happening to the peasant 
son of the village carpenter. He was a boy in all 
points tried like as we are, only without sin. There 
He learned the same lessons that we have had set 
to us to learn. As we look back, and feel a smart 
in the old conscience of memory at the follies and 
the wrong-doings of our own youth, we see Him, in 
the same scenes, only without such errors and faults. 
He was protected by no ineffable mystery, that He 
could not sin. If He had been He would not have 
been a boy, but only a cherub. He came to be a 
man. It is true that the veil of oblivion has been 
permitted to fall over the most of His life, but the 
comment is emphatic, that He was without sin. The 
silence of God is wonderful. We say, in our curious 
doubtings, that is all we know of Him ; but really 
that is enough. That is all that it can do us any 
good to know. We have, set in this emerald brooch, 
the one image of our need, a sinless boyhood. It tells 
us of an ideal purity, that has once been a fact on 
earth, which is all the more to be longed for, that it 
is so seldom realized by others. Why do we wish to 
know the very features of the Christ, which have been 
lost to earth ? which are as far from us as ever, 
though all the great painters of Europe have strug- 
gled to make them real, when we have the ideal 
image in our hearts, of the perfect life of Christ ? So 
is it with the boy. We have only to fancy what 
our homes would have been, if we had had more of 



THE HOME OF JESUS. 



47 



His sinlessness, more of His subjection to His pa- 
rents. We can recall the evil that we have caused, 
or the good that we have prevented ; and turn to 
that one household, where in one guileless memory 
there were no such regrets. That youth of ours we 
cannot recall. Let us do what we may to prevent 
the children from the same regrets. In one sense, 
I think that all the painters have done us great harm. 
They are always making the scenes of the home of 
Christ, as they think that they should have been, in 
aesthetic splendors. The lowly life of a villager has 
been lost sight of, in the fanciful glories of the Italian- 
Romish school. The true paintings of Christ are not 
yet made. The land of freemen has not yet raised 
up a race of men who really accept the faith, that the 
highest glory is in the education of the manhood 
that is in us. We cry out in half-questioning admi- 
ration of some artist's conceit of a little boy, who, 
standing in the sunlight, makes accidentally, a shadow 
of the cross before him on the ground. We have 
yet to see the great, healthy boy of Nazareth, in his 
happy obscurity, with marks of daily toil upon Him, 
and dare to look at Him just as if He were like boys 
that we know ; and feel that He may be so, and be 
none the less worthy to be the Lamb of God, to take 
away the sins of the world. 

Alas ! no present saints we find ; 
The white cymar gleams far behind, 
Revealed in outline vague, sublime, 
Through telescopic mists of time. 



48 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



The footprints of the life divine, 
Which marked their path, remain in thine ; 
And that great life, transfused in theirs, 
Awaits thy faith, thy love, thy prayers. 

II. It was the home of decent poverty. In other 
words, it was the home of honest working- people. 
How long Joseph lived, no one can now tell Tra- 
dition says, not long after the time of the text. We 
know no more about the state and circumstances of 
the family than that Jesus committed His mother to 
the care of St. John, when He died, as if she were 
then a widow ; but we can decide nothing from that 
circumstance. Nor is the relation of the Virgin to 
Joseph, nor indeed, any of the questions of the inge- 
nious builders of theories about that household ever 
to be settled, save by the dreams of monks, the 
decisions of the Pope, or the wishes of our hearts. 
He went down to Nazareth, and was subject unto 
them. What they commanded, He obeyed : they, 
mortal, sinful and uninspired rustics ; He, the only- 
Begotten, the unsealed font, as yet, of the transform- 
ing power of God, willing to be as lowly, poor and 
rustic as they were. 

" Where now with pain thou treadest* trod 
The Leader of the saints of God." 

Homely toil and unremitting industry, were never 
honored among any men as they were among the 
Israelites. No one of them was ever allowed to live 
a life of indolence in his youth. No matter how 



TEE HOME OF JESUS. 



49 



much his family might have of wealth or distinction, 
every boy was to prepare for the changes and chances 
of life, by learning an honest trade. American 
Christianity has half-forgotten this virtue. If, this 
day, any angel from heaven had power to let us 
choose between the payment of the debts of this 
whole country, governmental and individual, and the 
establishment of this one rule, on as sound a basis as 
the Jews had put it, the choice would be easy with 
wise men. It must remain among the curiosities of 
piety, that we Christians, while we are always exalt- 
ing the life of Jesus as the very model of the divine 
ideal for every man, do always manage in some way 
to avoid this, its chiefest characteristic. The virtue 
of the most Christian community is far behind its 
model on this point and probably will be for some 
ages yet; till the time that the ideas which now 
dwell in the brains of the poets, will again begin to 
take hold of the common sense of men. If any 
young man here is restless at the slow progress that 
he is making in the world, let him take home to his 
heart the fact, which is in some sense the chief one 
about Christ; the fact of this long, long, patient 
waiting, and this unnoticed toiling in the little 
obscure village of Nazareth. Had he none of your 
nature ? Was He that sublime being of the painters 
only, who looks down out of the canvas, in imper- 
turbable serenity on the tears and frettings of us little 
men as if He had had no part in them ? " O," says 
one, " be converted, and then you will be like Him." 
4 



50 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



Well ! let every one of us be converted. But in 
heaven's name let it be, by the example of Jesus, not 
by something else in order to get at that. Truth is 
the only real converter at the last. God works by 
it. My young friends ! take this example of Jesus 
to your hearts, and let it be printed on every restless 
ambition. He who had the world on His shoulders, 
who carried our sorrows, was content to wait, and see 
the world roll by him ; see his opportunities pass ; 
see the time of education slip from him ; see the day 
of youth slide slowly by, as he was working at the 
coarse, unintellectual trade of a village mechanic. 
What sort of a man, does such a life produce at 
thirty ? Are we quite prepared to see the Sinless 
One such a man, as we can understand ? God, 
we know, came down from beyond the stars, to bid 
us look to the lowly, that we might learn of Him, by 
loving man. Are we sure that we accept the lesson, 
quite ? 

Suppose one of your children to be on the crisis 
of a fate to-day, that might at forty give him little or 
no refined culture, no intimate acquaintance with the 
outer world, and would produce only a quiet, sober 
and honest peasant ; would it not be something hard 
to accept ? Would it not be easy to tempt any one 
of us to do some pretty hard things, and make some 
ventures in morals to prevent it ? And why ? If 
our life here is the beginning of another and an eter- 
nal one, then is not the first of all saving faiths this : 
that the servant of God can always afford to wait — 



THE ROME OF JESUS. 



51 



can never afford to risk his honesty ? Far above all 
other knowledges, sciences and refinements, is that 
one by which Jesus was destined to be the model for 
the whole race ; the knowledge of a soul at peace 
with itself and in communion with God. No vil- 
lager in the heaviest of clods ever was more entitled 
to a serene mind and an eventless life than He was. 
The spirit that Nazareth produced in Him is appreci- 
ated nowhere now more than in the quiet and lovely 
piety of rural life. The one temptation of our social 
life here in cities is the notion that we can do all 
things by genius, and accomplish wonders on the 
start. The danger is, that even the common virtues 
and laws of morality are in danger of suffering from 
this shallow conceit. It is not true. We shall find a 
change in this matter as the ways of men become 
more settled among us. The piety that lives by flirts 
and starts is not that which is learned in the home of 
Jesus. The virtues that at last are those to be val- 
ued by men, not to say by God as well, are learned 
in " quietness and in confidence. " The grace which 
we all may seek for in calming the passions of unrest, 
the hot ambition of pride, the swooping excitements 
of the race for pleasure and wealth, is the grace to sit 
still; not as the stupid and the indolent may do it, 
but as they only can do it who feel such faith in the 
providence and love of God that they can afford to 
wait. 

Could we see the true picture of the home of Je- 
sus, it might help us in doing this. It might help us 



52 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



to the wisdom which may lead us to cultivate the vir- 
tues that quieted the nerves and stilled the pulse of 
the Son of Mary. God grant us grace to love those 
virtues, and to see our children growing in that same 
wisdom, and in favor with God and man, that marked 
the life and created the example of the Saviour of 
mankind. 

Let us draw from this brief record of the youth of 
Jesus these home-lessons, which the errors of our 
time make necessary for us all. 

I. The value in Christian faith of unsullied, content- 
ed innocence. He lived obscurely, but no thought of 
any evil connects itself with Him. We are often re- 
minded by the one-sided theories of Christian life, 
which are common among us, of a great danger in 
this matter. It is quite too easy for parents to allow 
a theory of original sin to destroy the proper esti- 
mate of the piety of children. The}' anticipate bad- 
ness in them. They neglect the purity of thought 
which lies at the foundation of all true life, as if im- 
purity and naughtiness were the native growths of 
their lost souls. Are they " by nature born in sin 
and the children of wrath ?* J Be it so. Are they 
not by the gracious covenant of Christ w born again 
of water and the Holy Ghost ?" In other words, is 
not the living truth as "it is in Jesus," a seal of this 
higher possibility ? Or must we all forever look to 
see the path of the Prodigal Son, the Slough of De- 
spond, and early wantonness the only gate that can 
open on the way of life ? God forbid ! The youth of 



THE HOME OF JESUS. 



S3 



Jesus is as really a vital part of His Gospel, as is His 
death. Let us ponder it, till we grasp an idea of the 
duty of preserving the gifts of the Spirit to a child as 
pure in unstained innocence, as if we could see the 
original sin of its birth cleansed by a miracle of 
grace. 

II. The continuoitsness of piety is an idea of the 
life of Christ. Look at Him as man — and being 
suc h — the example of all His followers. Matthew 
and Luke, or Saul of Tarsus— or no other man is 
"The Way, the Truth and the Life." He only is 
such. He only was always our example. He only 
has given us a whole life sacred to God. It is the 
rule now for every one to be able to mark the very 
period of conversion. The One to whom we look 
for life was never converted. It is foreign to our idea 
of Him, that He ever could be. We say boldly that 
no dogmas should tolerate the common notion, much 
less create a common opinion, which is utterly alien 
to the unity of His life, and condemned by reason. 
The home of Christian boys and girls should be to 
them the nurseries of a pious life as continuous as 
that of Jesus — and the only final faith of the Church 
must begin at the Font. " Born in sin " is set off by 
1 born again 1 of a spiritual blessing. If nature is 
evil, grace meets it before reason comes to the infant 
and guides its willing feet into the path of life. 
Christ says to every mother, " Suffer the children to 
come unto Me." 

III. Lastly, the patience of the boy, living inglori- 



54 THE CECPcCE OF TEE EOUSEEOLD. 



oiisly in the village home of Nazareth, and toiling at 
the trade of a mechanic till he was thirty years old, 
should calm the heady and troublesome passions of 
our young people. Let us once catch the ideal of a 
pure youth, contented in the state, " in which it had 
pleased God to call Him." He threads the valleys, 
pants up the steep hills, looks off from their historic 
tops to the sacred places of His race— lives a true 
life, an all-comprehensive life of a true man, saint, 
prophet, poet; He has stirrings of soul, which bring 
heaven down to Him ; He fits Himself for the great 
work of God, to be the Reformer and Redeemer of 
all men, the Desire of all nations, the world's one 
great thought and God's one great Word, and (as I 
love to look at it) He grows up to it in the pabulum 
of a village life and the habits learned at a carpen- 
ter's bench. True, God's Spirit ' overshadowed Him/ 
and the soundings , of His own soul reached into 
the Eternities, but we see Him as man — as the son 
of a woman. We have a thread-line of thought by 
which we can track Him through these mysteries of 
the creed ; by which we are in Him and He may be 
in us. Our homes may teach our children the mighty 
lesson, to wait and be patient, to value the pure, 
and true, which are above all human distinctions, and 
to drink water out of the moss-covered well that 
runs by the lowliest household. I would have you 
read the lesson of the home of Jesus, as our Quaker 
poet has read it, and in his own noble simplicity and 
purity of manners, has largely translated it to 



THE HOME OF JESUS. 



55 



American men and women, how by His, our homes 
may " transfigured " stand. With Him I would have 
every true man able to say 

" Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more 
For olden time 2 n 1 holier shore ; 
God's love and blessing, then and there, 
Are now and here, and everywhere v" 



IV. 



THE PASSION OF HOME. 




"But the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.— St. Matt. 
viii. 20. 

HE meanest of animals is provided with a 
retreat for rest and safety ; and the greatest 
and best of men had no place to lay His 
head. This contrast, which has in it the 
charm of poetry, by the very form of its expression, 
has also a profound religious stimulus to our ordinary 
sympathies. The Son of Man appears before us as 
utterly self-denying, and destitute of all the common 
enjoyments of the meanest of God's creatures. The 
affections go out towards Him, in a pity, which does 
not stop to reason about Him. There is a flutter in 
the very nervous currents of the heart, which demand 
of us that we shall go to Him and help Him, as if 
the Helper were most helpless, before we stop to ask 
what this wretchedness means. It was because of 
the nearness of these sensibilities to the sublimer prin- 
ciples of religion, that the system of Christianity was, 
at the first, largely adopted by the tender and suffer- 



TEE PASSION OF HOME 



57 



ing people of the world. Those who themselves 
knew most of the evils of homelessness, who were 
despised of men because of poverty ; whose ignorance 
laid them open to the assaults of the powerful and 
violent ; in a word all the poor, for whatever cause, 
were first drawn to this Saviour, who was poorer 
than they, and who drew them to Him by the 
powerful cords of personal sympathy. As such 
people must always be in the majority in the world, 
it will always be from their ranks that the Church 
will be largely reinforced. It will always be true, 
that which was said by the first Bishop of Jerusalem : 
" Hearken, my beloved brethren, hath not God 
chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs 
of the kingdom which He hath promised to those 
who love Him ?" This is true, and the reason of it 
will always appear. The poor naturally will look to 
another world, for the enjoyments which are denied 
them in this. But I do not wish to dwell on this 
fact. I point you to the just inference from it ; that 
the home-passion is honored, in this choice of poverty, 
by the Redeemer of mankind. It was evident, in the 
Divine counsels, that the highest proof of the earnest- 
ness of self-denial, which the messenger of heaven 
could offer to the world, would be this willingness to 
be lonely and forsaken, while in His mortal state. 
It is the grandest tribute that can be given to the 
strength of the natural passion or affection of men for 
their homes. Next to the exhibition of the death of 
Christ on the cross, the strongest motive that is 



58 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



offered to convert us to His ways, is this fact, that 
He lived this life of self-denial ; as if it could not be 
gainsayed, that He who could do it, was a messenger 
of some higher sphere. 

On the other hand, St. Paul reckons among the 
signs of the last " perilous times/' which are to come 
on the desperate and ungodly world, the want of 
" natural affection." Natural affection is emphati- 
cally the love of^home, of wife and children, of rela- 
tives and nearer friends. It is natural, not spiritual. 
It belongs to the common nature of all men. It is 
in man as man. Sometimes it may not be found in 
a Christian man, to his discredit. It may be some- 
times found in a very imperfect man, and then we 
are forced to admire it, though we fail to honor the 
rest of such a character. The poem of Leigh Hunt, 
of the virtue of Abou-Ben-Adhem turns on this dis- 
crepancy. We are led by the charm of the senti- 
ment of affection for all things human, into the 
half-implied heresy in the lyric, of a doubt of the 
truth that is unchangeable ; i. e. y that we must love 
God supremely. 

I take all, at this time, as proofs of the strength 
of our natural love of home. If the great Missionary 
to this world, chose the denial of it, as the readiest 
proof of His Divine commission ; if it becomes a test 
of the degeneracy of the reprobates of the last times 
of confusion and every evil work, that men lose their 
love of nature in their own families, then it is a 
powerful passion. It needs to be acknowledged and 



THE PASSION OB 1 HOME. 



59 



understood. Its relation to religion is all-important. 
We cannot neglect it and be happy. 

One perversion of the truth, is always on the 
surface, in this matter. Enthusiasts and formalists 
alike mistake the use to be made of the example of 
Christ. The former would have all men seek the 
divine life in the sublime endurance of poverty. Their 
ideal would be found only, in " cool mountains and 
the desert air." The monks gave the first and the 
most enduring disturbance to the system of Christ 
in this particular. As the centuries have gone by, 
the influence of this disturbance has become less and 
less ; but it exists to-day, in the minds of men, even 
where its only effect is to make them unresting and 
inconsistent. Formalists pretend that the example 
of Jesus can only be had by those who, after their 
conception of it, do formally and by the letter just as 
He did, and deny themselves visibly before men, as 
He did. Instead of looking at the forms of life as 
necessary, and the varieties of its conditions as 
allowed in the Church of Christ, there is just enough 
of this spirit of formality in us, to incline us to 
neglect our duties, as men under the common law of 
nature. 

I say, that the passion of home is one of the strong- 
est of our passions, and, if rightly guided and culti- 
vated, it is capable of the richest fruits of grace; if 
left to the blindness of itself, it is equally capable of 
the contrary effects. And I would not be afraid to 
maintain the proposition that the majority of Chris- 



6o THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



tians seem to be afraid to speak of it as an element of 
the religious life at all. They seem to think, that be- 
cause the Son of Man had not where to lay His head, 
that it is somehow wrong for us to have them. They 
half-suspect that we ought to be more respectful to the 
form of that life, and imitate the. foxes less. They 
do not see that the true inference is, that the passion 
of the birds of the air and the great law of nature that 
teaches the foxes to provide for themselves a home, 
is no less the law of man. It is that natural affection, 
that he may not be without and cannot safely de- 
spise. The true religion must recognize it. The re- 
ligion that does not recognize it, is not that which 
approaches God, first of all, as a Father, and finds in 
Christ, an "Elder-brother." It is not the religion 
which, if it give up a home on earth, does it in su- 
preme love of that which it surrenders here, to have 
it returned in the New Jerusalem. 

The love of home is a passion. It is a natural pas- 
sion. The very force of the words, "Stranger and 
pilgrim," tell us how strong it is. The history of our 
religion repeats to us the same moral. The national 
history of religion began in the love of a "country" 
which God promised; a land flowing with milk and 
honey; a land of corn and wine, of oil-olive, and 
pomegranates; a land of peace and prosperity; 
where in calm and still home-life, the faithful race of 
the chosen children of God should wait the workings 
of the great plan of salvation. It lies under all our 
virtues of the social life. It is the synonyme for 



THE PASSION OF HOME. 



61 



patriotism. It is the source of the virtues that unite 
society into one healthy body. The origin of the 
word religion^ according to some scholars, is, from 
the fact, that it — re-ligo — binds men together into 
one society. It is stronger than the love of life. It 
was doubted of the apostle, whether a man could be 
found, who would die for another ; though, for a good 
man, one might be found willing to accept such a 
fate : but it has been the maxim of all states, that it 
is sweet to die for one's country. And the kernel of 
the love of country, is the love of the home which 
that country protects. 

Our personal distinctions show the same strength 
in this direction. We carry with us the fealty of the 
native air in which we began to be. The poetry of 
men, in all ages and all tongues, is filled out with the 
enjoyments of this sentiment. The chief difference 
between classic poetry, and that of the Bible, lies in 
the fact that the Bible catches these colors, of this 
natural affection, and uses them to paint the glories 
of the city of the future. 

Again, the disease of home-sickness tells us, very 
feelingly, of a fearful power in this passion, when it 
becomes the master. We all conjure up the poor 
Swiss soldiers of the French army, who were forced 
to fight in wars in which they had no heart, as they 
bowed like sick children at the sound of their moun- 
tain songs. But, is it necessary to go so far for our 
examples ? Our own society is out of joint enough, 
to furnish us with abundant examples of the terrible 



62 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 

force of this passion, when, under the madness of 
disappointment or poverty, it breaks over the banks 
and sweeps away the courage and self-control of 
individuals in wild confusion. That fierce wild Ger- 
man tragedy, in the newspaper lately; the father 
driven to despair in these great cities, for want of 
work; seeing the two dearest objects that a man 
knows, slowly starving to death, before his eyes, in the 
midst of crowds of Christian people, and with no hope ; 
his home slowly ground down and destroyed by the 
remorseless fates, without his power to help it. I tell 
you, that it is well for us that we are not called to 
judge such a man ; as in a madness, that is not insan- 
ity, but rather the intensest sort of mental action, he 
rushes uncalled into the presence of the Judge, with 
no better plea than this : " I offered in sacrifice, these 
two innocents, my wife and child, to save them from 
suffering. They are not suicides, I am : they are 
not murderers ; lam: visit on me the sin ; they at 
least are safe, in the rest of the grave." I say, I am 
glad, that we are not the judges. May God keep us 
from the temptation, when a man, in mercy to his 
wife and little child, chooses to send a pistol ball 
through their brains, as his dying legacy, and pater- 
nal benediction. 

I wish to emphasize the fact of tins natural passion, 
for it is one of the noblest, as w^ell as one of the 
strongest. Noblest, as it is the protoplasm of the relig- 
ious life. Protoplasm, says the dictionary, is a word 
of botany ; and means "the soft nitrogenous lining or 



TEE PASSION OF HOME. 



63 



contents of cells." In other words, there is in the 
minute cell, from which the great tree is destined to 
grow, certain contents, about which men talk with 
prodigious learning just now, as the substitute for a 
Deity. This much is to my purpose, and I leave 
the rest. This content of a microscopic cell, is so 
far beyond our reach, that we only know this of it : in 
one cell, it produces the giant oak, in another similar 
cell, it produces the wee bit daisy ; in one, the food of 
man ; in another — for all that we can see, just the 
same — the poison that maddens him and withers his 
bones, and consumes his flesh, " like a moth fretting 
a garment" All this is true of the protoplasm, that 
yet defies the finest effort of the microscope. If it 
shows any way to get on without a Creator, that the 
bulky form of an elephant does not better show ; I 
confess that I do not see it The protoplasm is none 
the less there. I said that the passion of home, is 
f the nitrogenous contents " of the cell of the heart 
of man, in which his religion takes its rise. His 
religion is a seed, of which Christ represented Him- 
self as the sower. The human heart He spake of as 
so many sorts of soil, into which this seed of the Tree 
of life is cast by His messengers. It takes root in it 
It takes its form and size from the soil. The soil is 
this natural affection. Whether it is to bring the seed 
to perfection or to starve and blast it, is not a chance 
of a miraculous system of arbitrary grace, but the law, 
established in the family, in which the heart is edu- 
cated. Some hearts are rocky, that is, they are 
5 



64 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



destitute of the experiences of the natural affections. 
They have had no home culture. No kind father led 
them by "green pastures and still waters/' so that, 
when the other Father came to them, they could 
transfer the love for the one to the other, without 
changing the tap-root ; and grow on without a trans- 
fer of their smaller roots from the truth. Or if they 
had such a father, they had been ungrateful. They 
had spent their time of early growth in perverse ways. 

Into other soil the gospel seed falls. Here the 
cares and pleasures of the world spring up with the 
seed and choke it. What are these cares and pleas- 
ures, but those of our daily experience in the homes 
that we are all alike making. May I dwell on this 
thought for a little ? Take a boy, and we need not 
go far to find him. He has a home, in which the 
whole atmosphere is purely religious. I do not mean 
now, is religious talk, or incessant religious works in 
special deeds of charity. I confess, that I believe that 
the best things of life and God are those of which men 
talk least. I mean now, a home where the duties of 
life are all performed so easily and naturally that the 
atmosphere is pervaded with the spirit of wisdom. 
Now the first meaning of the word piety is love of 
parents. It is the first piety of a healthy soul. It is 
the decree of the infinite Father that the natural 
father is, for a time, infallible to a good and healthy 
child. It is natural to a boy to believe that 
his father cannot do wrong; In the very fibres 
of his frame and his father's is the sameness 



THE PASSION OF HOME. 



65 



of substance. The unison of beat is in the two 
hearts ; yea; that mysterious law, that underlies the 
very decalogue of Moses, that the sins of the father 
descend to the son, is true on the other side as well ; 
that the right opinions and principles of the progeni- 
tor are the heritage of the offspring. The home is 
the protoplastic mould of the future life. Now, let 
us drop out of sight our sect-systems of faith for the 
moment My position is that the boy who is blessed 
with such a home, sound in all points, is like the good 
soil of the parable. He can grow, as did the Son of 
Mary, in wisdom and in favor with God and man, as 
he grows in age, and never know, and certainly never 
need to know a break in his religious life. 

Let me make one other point just here, and I am in 
tremulous earnest about it. No matter how good a 
boy may be ; nay, the better he is, and the keener his 
religious life is, there comes a time with all real men, 
when the shell of boyhood drops off from us. The 
time comes when he wakes to the realities and duties 
of life; when the light and beauty of mere dreamy 
childhood falls away. Once he is like the infant of 
the poet, in the swing under the trees. He thinks 
their tops are close against the sky. There must 
come the time when he wakes 

" To find he's farther off from Heaven 
Than when he was a boy/' 

Poor Byron, you remember, said, that " the pas- 
sage from youth to manhood is over the bridge of 



66 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



sighs." It is true of all men who ever come to much, 
in after life. Now may I ask, in all charity, is there 
not a religious school which has seized on this natural 
fact, and made a wrong use of it ? A deepening of the 
religious life after the peaceful growth of childhood is 
as natural and as necessary in good men, as the efforts 
seen in certain plants, which seem for awhile to be 
given up to the one duty of shedding only perfume 
on the air. Then comes a marked change in their 
whole manner of growth ; and they show that a de- 
cree has gone forth, in the . change of the seasons, that 
they shall begin to live only for the coming times. 
So is it with the human plant. 

Now this law, in my judgment, is forced out of its 
place, when it is made to do duty for what men 
choose to call religion : when they make it the one 
grand object of the Gospel, and depreciate all the 
other periods and all other duties of life ; when they 
change the Church into an institution for converting 
prodigals and generating believers born out of due 
time, and neglect or, pour shame upon the steady 
growth and progress of a virtuous life. 

The boy of whom I spake then, may be supposed 
to await this coming time of his conscious life. He 
is still in the palace and church of his home. He 
does not yet act, by way of the self-imposed motive. 
He does not yet assert himself. He is not ashamed 
to be seen wearing the collar of his youth, the sign 
of a docile spirit. He has been up to the Temple 
and seen the Rabbis there ; he has asked them ques- 



TEE PASSION OF EOME. 



6 7 



tions as well as answered theirs. He has seen 
beyond the limits of his father's house, and heard 
the moanings of the great sea, and has now and then 
longings to put out on it, and begin for himself. To 
him, religion may be heard, speaking in the tones of 
the old home-teaching, which is always the same: 
" My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and for- 
sake not the law of thy mother; for they shall be an 
ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about 
thy neck." He, as did his Saviour, goes still down 
to Nazareth, and is subject to his parents ; now by a 
higher motive and with a more quick reward, than 
when he was an unthinking boy. There are such 
boys — thank God for them ! If there are not more, 
stop and ask the question, Whose fault is it? We 
have them in hand, for the tender time of youth. 
We claim that virtue is better than vice, religion than 
sin. Why is it that they are so few ? May it not 
be in us ? That we do not believe in the innocence of 
youth ? That our standard of piety is somehow 
distorted ? That we are busy with another sort of 
ragged school of ingrates, who have been left to 
wander abroad, until the fresh graces and innocent 
habits of home-life have been lost forever ? Is the 
common notion of the oneness of the religious con- 
sciousness, from youth to old age, such in the 
churches that there is the proper encouragement to 
our children to look on their duty to God, just as 
they do on their duty to their neighbors ; as, not 
only something that they are always bound to pay, 



68 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



but something which they always can pay? If it is 
not, then it is wrong; it is unscriptural ; it is un- 
natural and unreasonable. 

The foundations of the true religious life are all 
laid in youth. The motto on the old clock in the 
school-room where I was taught the classics, was 
true : " Youth is the seed time of life." The Church 
of God is built on the passion for home. On the 
boy or the girl that you are forming now every day, 
is the future piety of the Church dependent. The 
children are in the soft influences of the spring time 
of life. The sunlight of the spring is peculiarly 
actinic, as the photographers would say. You can 
never take a picture at any other season, as you can 
in the early hours of a spring morning. The sunlight 
of autumn is lurid compared with it. It is the light 
in which nature means to mature the fruits, and it 
follows another rule. Let then your children have 
the full advantage of the prime impressions of their 
vernal faith. Let them have the unfailing resource 
of a pious home, and they will have a strong rock of 
defence, in the later times, when, alas! the cares and 
temptations of the busier life will make it very hard 
to catch up with those who have had this advantage. 
I respect the prodigal, if he is sincere ; but I do 
much more regard that son who remained always at 
home with his old father, even if he was in the 
wrong, in finding fault with the love that burned in 
the older man's heart. Any one may have the 
" fatted calf" for anything that I may say. Give 



THE PASSION OF HOME. 



6 9 



me the record of the other: "Son, thou art always 
with me, and all that I have is thine. Thou hast 
never taught me the joy of this hour, by the long 
woes of a previous despair." Let any one rejoice in 
the raptures of a late conversion. God bless them ! 
I am humble enough to accept the unmentioned 
growth of those disciples who always followed the 
Lord. It is a blessed thing, if some can be born out 
of due time. It is infinitely more blessed, that the 
rule is that we are usually born in due time and by 
an unfailing law. 

Finally, then, as an inference from all that I have 
said : let parents take due heed of the law of reason 
and of religion alike, that in holiness as well as in 
education, youth is the seed time of life. If St. Paul 
could appear to us for once, I would ask him to 
preach to us from two texts, and tell us all that 
passed through his mind as he wrote them. I see 
the generous heart of the old man beating quicker 
as he wrote these words to Timothy, his beloved 
comrade : " When I call to mind the unfeigned faith 
that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother 
Lois, and thy mother Eunice ; and I am persuaded 
in thee also." Or again: "Continue thou in the 
things which thou hast learned and hast been as- 
sured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them ; 
and that from a child thou hast known the holy 
Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto 
salvation." Remember that he said this of the Old 
Testament; for it was that volume that lay on the 



70 THE G HUE OH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



lap of the aged grandmother, and fired the zeal of 
the heart of the village boy, at the foot of the Kara- 
dagh. You, brethren, let me hope, have recollec- 
tions which bring to your remembrance the words 
of the Apostle to the Gentiles, with a sweet per- 
suasive force of its own. 

Of all the possessions that you can leave your 
children, there is none like this : leave them the rev- 
erence of a religious fervor, as they say in their hearts, 
" Such was home to me ; there, at the fountains of 
my being, I learned the ways of eternal life. From 

a father's instruction, I took the doctrine of wisdom : 

from a mothers law;" — (mark the word : — It was a 
father's instruction ; he reasoned about it, and proved 
it by chapter and verse ; but it is a mother's law, 
oracular, infallible, not always capable of a reason, nor 
needing one in words.) From that law, "drawn 
from the heart's deep well/' I received the " chains 
about my neck " which have been often as amulets, 
against the enticements of the wicked. The tap-root 
of such a piety is struck far down in the passion of 
home, and defies the drought, and laughs at the wild 
winds of doctrine. I presume that I am not ranked 
as very bigoted in my place among men. But there 
is a bigotry that is a priceless treasure to any man. 
It is the memory of a pure home ; of a wise father, a 
holy mother— not only in the intellect, but also in the 
very fibres of the frame,— in the undefined refine- 
ments of the soul ; the sweet breath of the chaste con- 
versation, the amenity of the little morals that shed 



THE PASSION OF HOME. 



71 



beauty on the common actions of each passing day ; 
the high sense of the rights of others, which teaches 
justice, not more as a duty to another than as the no- 
bler privilege of the actor himself ; the religion which 
seldom questions and less seldom doubts; the se- 
renity of spirit that instinctively adopts the higher 
laws of a Saviour's example, by its innate dislike of 
the opposite ; in a word, a piety that, according to 
the old maxim, finds use a second natitre. Such a 
piety is that wisdom of which the proverb says : "She 
is more precious than rubies ; and all the things thou 
canst desire are not to be compared to her." Any 
other piety may suffice to tell the tale of a late repent- 
ance ; but late repentance mast never become the ride, 
or Christianity will be damaged by the compromise. 
It was the piety of the Son of Mary. He learned it 
at his mother's knee, where it had been always, and 
yet most frequently is, taught to the saints of his peo- 
ple. It sustained him in the deepest poverty. It 
was his consolation, when he was compelled to mourn 
that "He came to his own and his own received Him 
not;" when, He alone, of all His people, could say 
with truth: "The Son of Man hath not where to lay 
His head." It can do as much for us, if need be. 



V. 



HOME-VIRTUES. 

" And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which 
I do: seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and 'mighty 
nation ; and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him ? 
For I know him, that he will command his children and his house- 
hold after him, that they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do 
justice and judgment ; that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that 
which he hath spoken of him. , '— Gen. xviii. 17-19. 

HIS text has one striking feature. It shows 
the Divine Being, reasoning with Himself, 
about the ways and means of the first 
covenant which was about to be made with 
man after the fall. Three men came to the tent of 
Abraham. He extends to them the usual hospitality 
of his people. One of them promises the gift of a 
son to the aged man, and hears the incredulous laugh 
of the aged Sarah. They rise to resume their travels, 
and look or walk towards Sodom. The kind old 
man goes a little way with them. And the Lord, or 
as it ought' to be read, "the Jehovah, said. ,, And 
then the text follows. I use it to-day to make one 
point of it. The virtues which are taught in the 
revealed religion, are the virtues of home. Notice, 




HOME-VIRTUES. 



73 



that as yet, so to say, God has not committed Him- 
self. The whole matter of a revealed system of 
religion in the Mosaic record is as yet in His own 
keeping. He has not done anything which requires 
another thing to follow. The Deity is represented 
under the form of a man, debating, as it were, 
whether He shall tell Abraham what He means to do 
in the ages to follow. The point on which He seems 
to turn and come to a decision is the fact, that he 
knows him, " that he will command his children and 
his household after him, that they shall keep the way 
of the Lord/' The authority of the parent is thus 
made the corner-stone of the primary religion. The 
virtues of all revealed religion were to be taught at 
home. They are still. In our zeal for the compli- 
cated machinery of religion, for which I thank God 
as useful in its place, we are always inclined to forget 
this law. Religion seems to rise up in our minds as 
if it were altogether ecclesiastical or sacerdotal — some 
few works of devotion, some schemes of missions, 
some set modes of almsgiving, and assembling in 
public to read the Bible and listen to preaching. 
The virtues of good neighborhood, " the justice and 
judgment " of which the text speaks, seem to belong 
to the inferior agencies of school and home. Is this 
true? Is it so in the great scheme of revealed 
religion ? I think not 

The first faith, if we can consider this man the 
Father of the faithful, began in the creed which is 
contained in this text. It comes from a Council that 



74 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



was infallible, being the words of God Himself. He 
states as the reason for his favor to Abraham : 

L That he will be a model father, in commanding 
his children and his household after him, that they 
shall keep the way of the Lord. 

II. That he will teach them to do justice and 
judgment. 

III. And that the end of this obedience will be, 
"That the Lord may bring upon Abraham that 
which He hath spoken of him. ,, It seems to me that 
the point is proved, and that it needs no more words. 
May I use it here, at our own doors ? The same law 
holds good with us, as with him. Let us see if it 
does. The first virtue and the first religion is the 
healthy obedience to just authority. Make all the 
exceptions that you please, and bring it down to 
all reasonable results; I am content to take the 
residuum. There are two modes of obediences in my 
mind; one y that of a child to its father; the other, 
that of a man to God. I suppose, that the most 
radical reformer has some sort of respect for the 
family system ; in which, if only for occasional con- 
venience, there is some sort of control required. If 
he has not, I wish him no farther punishment than 
to be compelled to dwell with the Eli-fathers and 
mothers of spoilt children. If he does not improve 
his thoughts, he certainly will abundantly exercise his 
patience. 

I take for granted that there is some sense of 
authority left in the minds of men, for the Omniscient 



HOME-VIRTUES. 75 

Being in whom we creatures of the dust live and 
move. I maintain that the virtue of obedience to 
this latter authority is to be learned at home. 

I will go for my instance to a plantation life before 
the war. In some things it came far nearer the life 
of this particular man Abraham than any other that 
I know of. The planter had a power over his house- 
hold, children and slaves, which was very like that 
of the shiek of an Eastern tribe of Arabs. I propose 
now not to show the right or wrong about slavery ; 
but to talk on this point in hand, just as I did then. 

The first practical curse of the American system 
was that it created a practical lie in the household 
of the plantation. Every man taught his children, 
that all men are born " free and equal." The nation 
believed it. It was a subject of patriotic rejoicing. 
More than that, the course of politics made it an 
emphatic thing. White men held to it as a most 
precious right. The spirit of independence in the 
white was rather unreasonably active, and was 
intolerant and fierce. But the trouble was, that in 
every man's house there were the blackest proofs 
that it was not true. There was, so to say, a lie in 
every man's right hand. The colored people were 
not free, nor independent : nay, it was the unspoken 
terror that haunted the hearts of all, and often took 
shape in wild dread of all manner of excitements, and 
fears of insurrection, that they would ever become so. 

When the Danish government proposed to the 
islanders of Santa Cruz to prepare the negroes for 



7 6 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



freedom by educating them up to it ; it also made 
it possible, by exercising the power of the home- 
government, in compelling the slaves to be educated, 
and the colonists to educate them. We had no such 
central power. We had no place for the white man 
to learn the advantages to him of personal obedience. 
We had no other avenue out of the perplexity than 
the bloody path of violence and war. In my judgment, 
it was all for want of the right teaching of home. 
Nothing could induce a proud, independent race, to 
accept the modification of the principles of that Decla- 
ration, which, they remembered, originated with one 
of themselves. They went to the extreme of State- 
rights, on the one side; and to the other extreme, 
of irresponsible, individual power over the slaves. 
The result could have been only evil, in the end, no 
matter what the outside world might have done. It 
was inevitable, that either the white race must have 
sought refuge in some sort of autocratic power, either 
an oligarchy or a monarchy, or in the abolition of 
slavery. It was as plain as the day, that the disso- 
nance was destined to create trouble. It did do it. 
Many a Christian, from pure conscience, retired from 
the slave States, to escape it. The homes of men 
cannot be built on a falsehood. No matter what the 
Church or the State may teach, the vital teaching is, 
at last, that which we receive at home. The slave- 
holder became the fierce duellist. It was the only 
solution of his perplexities. Yea, it was this very 
fact of resort to violence as the last appeal, that at 



HOME- VIRTUES. 



77 



last reached the Senate hall of the capitol of the 
United States, and fired the northern heart, in the 
winter of 1855-6. As I stood on a gloomy day by 
the cold corpse of the actor in that scene, and read 
the burial service over him, I felt then, as I do now, 
that he was only the victim of a civilization, which 
neither he nor I could understand or make right. 
All has passed. It is now rather as a dream, that we 
refer to it. Let the wrath be buried. Let us take 
heed to the lesson which it teaches us. The teaching 
of home is the vital teaching of life. If there are 
dissonances there, no matter how pure and exalted 
may be the public documents, that tell of the duties 
which we owe the State ; no matter how scriptural 
and catholic the sentiments of the popular piety of 
the Church, the end is ruin. The safety of 
both Church and State is found in the homes 
of the citizens. If the morality which is learned 
there be pure, the people can bear any amount of 
misgovernment, with the patience that endures evils, 
which are always in their power to remedy. When 
the necessity arises, the people taught in home- 
virtues will remedy them. But if the fountains of 
domestic life are corrupted, then the end is not far oft". 

The question then arises, are we now sound on 
the matter of the government of the family? In the 
main, we are. The very rages of our reformers tes- 
tify to the sense of a want of sympathy from the great 
body of the people. The noises of the few, who are 
resolved to reconstruct society, prove, as yet, their 



/8 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



zeal rather than their success. We may be patient 
with them as yet. I confess that I feel that one 
danger to our peace arises from the unsuspected side 
of our religion. And in the line of that fear, I offer 
these remarks, as to the authority of those relations 
in our homes, which, as they were first to appear in 
the divine esteem and in the order of providence, so 
they cannot yield to any other authority, outside of 
the circle of home. 

Abraham was priest by right of his fatherhood in 
his own family. This was the first Succession. It 
began at the gate of Eden. It will endure to the 
end of the world. No priest nor preacher is to be 
allowed to interrupt the relation between the head 
of the family and the members of it, without loss to 
all concerned. It was the fact, that Abraham would 
command his children, by which the Lord was moved 
to bless him ; not that he would provide some one 
else to do it It is the part of the coward in us, 
that we are so willing to permit vicarious interfer- 
ence in the affairs of the family. We are more or 
less used to one and another sort of kindly inter- 
ference from outsiders, and we receive it as if it 
were the best thing to do, to receive it. Any evils 
in receiving it seem so small in comparison with 
other advantages which have become traditional, 
that it may seem almost the part of an infidel to 
question the right of interference in the pursuit of 
such advantages. For all that, the thing is wrong. 
The true head of every household is the parent, and 



HOME VIRTUES. 



79 



his power over the family, in matters of vital charac- 
ter, he cannot delegate to any other. 

It seems to me that there are two considerations 
which present themselves here, and deserve our 
care. 

I. That the true obedience, which we all need, 
is not taught by words, by either liturgies or preach- 
ing, or any sort of verbal catechisms, so much as by 
actual life. 

II. That, when it is successfully taught, it of itself 
runs into and determines the nature of all religion. 
Perhaps it may be said, that it is religion. 

I. Obedience is taught by life, not by books or 
by words. Both the latter may help teach it ; but 
they do not communicate the thing. We may sup- 
pose a case. Fancy a child who could be kept in 
entire freedom from all manner of experience, till, in 
some way, its mental powers could be suddenly 
developed up to the point of understanding the 
lore of books without the intervention of the living 
authority. Let it then be supposed to go through 
all the maxims and dogmas of a thoroughly logical, 
authoritative scheme of perfect education : just as a 
student of navigation traces the coast line of a diffi- 
cult region, in his room by books and instruments 
only, without ever going to sea. The former runs 
over in his mind all the reasonings of the men of old, 
which go to show that one person must obey an- 
other, simply because he had the accidental circum- 
stance imposed on him, without his own consent, to 



8o THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



be born after him. Take from him, if you please, all 
the passions which make obedience difficult. Re- 
move from him equally all the affections, which 
make it "lovely and of good report," and which 
experience alone can develope. Let the problem be 
purely intellectual. Let it be, in a manner, alto- 
gether mathematical. Given : B, who is born after 
A. by some twenty years. B is to A in the posi- 
tion of obedience. If B desires a thing, he can 
have it only as he consults the superior authority of 
A. If he crosses the pleasure of A, he must be 
deprived of certain pleasures and advantages, and 
subjected to the opposite pains. He can be at his 
ease only as he fulfils the relation thus established 
between the two. Here, then, he questions : Who 
established the relation ? And the answer which he 
gives is the corner-stone of his religion. Intellectually 
he sees no need for any such relation. He denies 
the authority. He sees no need for any such God. 
Why? Because he has no need in the mere in- 
tellect for any such idea as that of Father. 

The intellect is sexless. It is the chart only of the 
soul. It is the mere tracery of the fine lines, that tell 
where the tidal currents run the wildest • where the 
dangerous headlands are to be found and where the 
reefs are the perils of the sailor. I tell you, brethren, 
there has been a tremendous life power established in 
you all, before your intellect began to ask the reasons 
of things, or to assert your own existence. It is as if 
your closet student of navigation should definitive! 



HOME-VIRTUES. 



81 



assert, to an old tar, that on such a coast, the lines ot 
the land run in such or such a direction and extend 
just so far into the sea. He tells him, " Put your helm 
up, and run your ship ten hours and twenty minutes 
exactly, on this line that I have marked out for you ; 
then put her about and steer directly into port on this 
line. ,, The student goes by the chart. What is so 
fixed and certain as mathematics? Do we not spin 
the fine lines of thought by them, and tell to a min- 
ute, when the distant star will again cross the disc of 
the transit instrument? And if so, who can doubt 
their decisions, in the small matter of a pitiful line of 
a shore on the surface of the earth? Your sailor 
laughs at you; he knows that after all the proper 
calculations of the ephemeris, and the finest measure- 
ments of the chart, there is a world of knowledge, of 
storms and currents, and variations of needle, that is 
all his own ; into which you and your closet specula- 
tions cannot be suffered to come. It is the real sea, 
that he knows by experience, with its varying winds 
and changing storms; its contrary currents and shift- 
ing sand-banks, which no chart can fix and no al- 
manac of the heavens determine for him. He takes 
all you can do for him, gladly ; but he does his work 
by other rules than those which make up your phi- 
losophy. There is this same sophistry put off on us, 
in the matters of life. They, who for some reason 
have lost the conservation of home, and are dead to 
its refinements, parade their charts before us unblush- 
ingly, and reason out their nice little theories of 
6 



82 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the equality of mind of all the human species. They 
seem to have the intellect on their side, and are 
skilful to entrap the unwary into acceptance of their 
schemes. Meanwhile the great currents are running 
on, and one terrible tragic cry after another comes 
up on the air, of the shipwrecked and forlorn, whose 
barks have been stranded on the sunken rocks of life 
by these unskilful pilots. It is your boy, who has no 
experience of a home, who by the force of unaided 
reason, attempts to make his way without this greater 
teaching. 

An old clergyman was once asked by an anxious 
mother: "At what age her boy would become a 
moral agent?" His reply was a shrewd one. 
" Madam, how old is he?" "A little more than two 
years." Then, if you have not trained him yet in 
moral duties, you have lost two years." I have 
been eighteen years an intimate in the nursery, and 
I have never been half as anxious for the teacher of 
the minds of my children, as I have for the nurse of 
that infancy. You remember that in the old nations 
of the world, the faithful nurse was honored next to 
the mother, and her support in age was held to be 
the sacred duty of all good men. We mistake this 
training. Obedience is not merely the listening to 
the "thou shalt" and the "thou shalt not," of fixed 
law. The real authority of daily life is not cast in the 
stern moulds of tables of stone or iron. The laws 
that you and I obey quickest are expressed in a look. 
There are impulses as powerful with us as if the thun- 



HOME-VIRTUES. 



83 



ders of heaven were roaring them to all the universe, 
when they drop out in the " still small voice" of a 
holy sentiment of love. Is there anything of more 
force, than the instance of the power of the love that 
rules in the Christian world — than the look, which 
Jesus gave Peter, in his hour of shame; and " Peter 
went out and wept bitterly." I tell you, that a family 
is in the desert of waterless sand, when the author- 
ity of it is mostly exercised by spoken rules ; when 
the ring of the mother's voice is the familiar sound, 
from morning to night, in perpetual protest, with 
its dreary, "don't," and "you sha'n't" The true law 
of home is the same as it is in the Church of the 
great Father. It is the royal law of liberty. But it 
is none the less the law of the great Father that rules 
in nature. There, the soul that sinneth, must die. 
I do not mean now, the body will die, but the soul : 
it dies. And the signs of a dead soul are rebellion 
and unbelief. The sun shines and the dead body 
does not see it. The finer instincts of the soul die. 
A man does not have them. They are dead. He, 
or what is the best about him, is dead. Let him 
alone: " Let the dead bury him." He goes to sa- 
loons, and has his ghostly meetings with the ghouls 
there. He finds out the places where the paths all 
lead down to the chambers of the dead. Only take 
this fact for granted, the next time that you hear of 
these vagaries of the radical school, who would make 
our homes desolate with their pestilent theories of 
rebellion. 



84 THE CHUBCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



Authority must always be asserted by us over the 
evil and the disobedient, even if its only influence be 
to compel them to corrupt the quicker. There are 
some advantages, in the long run, in corruption. It 
is the recuperative process of nature in removing 
things wasted and useless. But no one, in my 
judgment, is sound, who claims to be wiser than " it is 
written.' 5 The first of the pious saints was com- 
mended for that quality in him on which, at last, all 
the nations of the earth would be blessed in him ; 
that he would lay the foundations of his religious 
teaching of his children, deep down in the hard-pan 
of family obedience. I have seen a child, in a spasm 
from the whooping-cough, assisted by its nurse, taking 
a strong grip of its wrists. Nothing more. How 
absurd, says the reason of your bachelor. Granted. 
But it is true, none the less. So the lovingness of 
wise parents is bound to surround the children, in 
all their ways ; to be before them and anticipating 
all their dangers; looking out for them, heading 
them off at times as the shepherd does a silly sheep, 
carrying them in the bosom and accustoming them 
to the very sound of the voice as that which in time 
will dwell in their minds like a voice from between 
the cherubim. No book, no catechism — no preach- 
ing nor sacrament can teach all the arts of true love. 
No paper chart can convey to any sailor's mind the 
shade of the green shores, or the sweet perfume at 
which, 



85 



for many a league 

Old ocean smiles " 

These things belong to a " jealous God." He 
sheds them around your home. They are the graces 
of it. It was for this that He gave them. They are 
the colors out of which you are to paint the scenery 
of the other home in the skies. When St. John told 
men about paradise, go and read it carefully. You 
will find that all the colors that he used are taken out 
of the lessons that he had heard in the houses and 
synagogues of Galilee, illuminated by the tale of the 
love of God in Christ. 

II. So, secondly, the one tiling runs into the other. 
Your character as formed at home is the real ground- 
work of your religion. Two things are to my mind 
axioms, that admit of little reasoning and defy debate. 
One is, that the deepest instincts of religion are dumb, 
of themselves, until they find analogies to speak them 
out The other is that human nature, in its deeper 
principles of life, never changes. You plant an acorn. 
A thousand years hence the fruit of it will be an acorn, 
and not a humble bee. In the line of the first re- 
mark, I say, the instinct of the human soul is for 
God. He dwells in the thick darkness. I let my 
imagination run out on one single line beyond 
Saturn, then take that space for a measuring tape 
and travel on ten thousand billion of world-cycles at 
the rate of speed of the ray of light, and see world 
after world rise and fall as I go by : see stars begin 
and last millions of years and go out again, as in a 



86 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



moment ; and at the last, I stop to take a bearing, 
and I am perfectly sure of one fact; that I am no 
nearer the outer limit of immensity and of God's 
infinite presence than I was at the start I flutter 
back, on the idea that every atom of that space is 
infinitely divisible into the homes of animalculae, 
which the microscope pursues on the other edge of 
infinitesimal thought. And then I know, that where 
ever, in all that space, up or down, I know anything, 
I know that law is ruling, and if law, then a law- 
giver ; a spirit of all law, a mind that imagined and 
created it all, and a heart that made it all and found 
it all to be very good. You perhaps do not see it. 
I am not saying that you do. I say only, that I do. 
I can say more; that man, as man, always does 
this; that the earth is strown everywhere with the 
temples and altars that tell the old, old tale of his 
always groping after God, if happily he might find 
Him. 

Now, this Being, who inhabiteth eternity, and 
makes His dwelling place in all space, so that he 
who takes the wings of the morning, and flies east or 
west, up or down, is never away from His goodness, 
or beyond the grasp of His power, is simply, utterly 
inconceivable. The words are emphatic : He dwells 
in the thiek dai'kness.. Do you try to deny Him ? 
That is not helping you. The idea is the necessity 
of your own being. You cannot flee from His pres- 
ence ; for in this idea, we live and move and have 
our being. Now the one word, which eliminates 



HOME-VIRTUES. 



87 



this idea into the light is this : our Father. The 
philosophy of the gospel is, that " the Son, who 
dwelleth in the bosom of the Father, He hath re- 
vealed Him." It required a son or an hypostasis, 
which was to be called by that name, to reveal Him, 
in such way that all men could believe on Him and 
have a religion at all It was so with all the saints, 
in all the ages, which are covered by the written 
Word If human nature is the same at bottom, 
then it is so now; and it is still the sign of the 
bastard and the fool, to say in the heart, There is no 
God. 

Now then, and I think that the point is of im- 
mense importance to right thought on a variety of 
subjects; — the father of the home is the sacred 
hieroglyph — is the real teacher of the Divine Father. 
He is the similitude of fatherhood, that any one of 
us sees in the Mount of Vision. He is the pattern 
laid away in the heart's deep well, and no plummet 
can reach down to take it up again ; the pattern, 
that the later reason only fills out, to give us the 
notion of the Father of all men. The elemental 
voice-cry of the world's redemption is heard in this 
one message : " God so loved the world, that He 
gave His Son, to save it" And we go back to 
Abraham and his son; and we look down the sweet 
vista of our own home-life, and of other homes, and 
the idea takes shape in our hearts. We interpret 
the essence of the creed, not so much by the 
opinions of the venerable men, the bishops and 



88 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



philosophers who made it, as we do by the love of 
home, that has made it a living thought in our 
hearts. We may all pray with the poet : 

" Dear God and Father of us all, 
Forgive our faith in cruel lies, 
Forgive the blindness that denies ! 

"Forgive thy creature when he takes, 
For the all perfect love Thou art, 
The grim creation of his heart." 

The infinite God seems to speak to us, in the sacred 
retreats of home, and His word to us is : " My son, 
give me thine heart." Thus the religion of Christ 
is the religion of nature and of a purified humanity. 

" Christ's love rebukes no home -love, breaks no tie of kin apart ; 
Better heresy of doctrine, than heresy of heart." 

One word then, in conclusion. If this be true, 
and it seems to me that I could array all the 
true things of Scripture and life, to illustrate it, then, 
brethren, how sacred are our homes to us ! How 
blessed is the household, where the parents are 
humble Christians ! How happy is his lot, who finds 
the thoughts of his parents always running on the 
parallel of his faith in the sublime dogmas of his 
religion. 

Born at first of those who gave up so much for 
him, he was truly born again in due order, in the 
womb of their love. He entered the church of the 
saints, through the lowly door of his early baptism 



HOME-VIRTUES. 



8 9 



and its appointed training. He was converted by 
sacred law, and became as a little child, before he 
was anything else. When he prays to the Infinite, 
he trembles back instinctively on the wings of that 
divinity, that whispers to his doubts, " If ye, being 
evil, know how to give good things to your children, 
how much more shall God ?" If he bows his head 
in sorrow, he hears a word saying unto him : " As 
we had fathers of our flesh, who chastised us, and 
we gave them reverence, shall we not much rather 
be in subjection to the Father of Spirits and live ?" 
If he comes to the last and closing scene of all, he 
sings his death-song in the same sacred love of his 
heart's earliest recollections ; and the " angels, lean- 
ing over the walls of crystal, hear/' the simplest of 
all creeds become the grandest of all the misereres ; 
" Father, not my will, but thine be done !" He is 
then, in the oldest and most expressive of comforting 
hopes, " gathered to his fathers." 

Oh ! ye, who have the links of young souls thus 
fastened on your own, how can you do aught but 
seek to consecrate yourselves and them at the altar 
of our common faith, and carry with you, in all the 
by-ways of daily life, for them, the blessing of our 
Mother the Church! How can you fail to make 
your homes the religious inheritance of your families ? 
God help us to catch the music of the true faith of 
the Gospel, and reconcile for them and us the disso- 
nances of common life. 

So mould your hearts by the lessons of inspired 



90 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



wisdom, that your homes may be evidently conse- 
crated by the blessing of God the Father. So train 
your children that it may truly be said of each one 
of them : 

" He worshipped as his fathers did, 
And kept the faith of childish days, 
And howsoe'er he strayed or slid, 
He loved the good old ways — 
The simple tastes, the kindly traits, 
The tranquil air, and gentle speech* 
The silence of the soul that waits 
For more than man to teach. ' ' 



VI. 



MARRIAGE HONORABLE. 



"Marriage is honorable in all." — Hebrews, xiii. 4. 



HETHER St. Paul intended to say, that 
marriage is honorable in all people, or in 
all the things and circumstances that be- 
long to it, we hardly care to ask. Either 
way, it was a pertinent assertion, and cut across the 
errors of that age, and of the ages that have followed, 
about equally. The early heresies of the East 
assumed to be capable of teaching men a path of 
higher morality and purer religion than that which 
was revealed in the Church. The men who assumed 
to be the especial examples of piety, sometimes 
claimed a right to despise and abominate the rite of 
marriage, as the chain in which the foul spirit of 
evil sought to drag mankind into the slough of de- 
struction. The Church has not yet recovered 
altogether from the perversions, which then affected 
her prosperity and usefulness in the regeneration of 
the world. The assertion is still as pertinent as ever, 
in the one sense as in the other. Marriage is honor- 




92 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



able, in all classes of men ; it is the same, in all things 
that of right belong to it. The Prayer-book has 
occasion to quote this expression of St. Paul, in the 
Office of Holy Matrimony. It goes on to add : " and 
it is not to be entered into by any, unadvisedly or 
lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, 
and in the fear of God." It would appear to have 
settled it, that the signification of the text was, " In 
all men" But to this we may remark: that at the 
time when the book was compiled, that was the only 
question which was mooted. The other had ceased 
to disturb the consciences of Christians. The two 
churches of the East and West, which then held 
themselves to be the only final and infallible dispen- 
sers of the truth of revelation, unhappily persisted in 
attaching to the holy estate of matrimony the ban of 
ecclesiastical disapprobation. In our day and gene- 
ration, very few persons are ever disturbed on the 
subject. Now and then some over-scrupulous 
reader of the Epistles, takes a momentary fright, at 
some of the sayings of this same writer about celi- 
bacy and matrimony; but it is not often of any 
serious continuance. The evil that troubles our 
peace now, arises from other considerations. The 
majority of Christian teachers somehow seem to give 
the subject up in despair. They leave it altogether 
to the novelist and to the theatre. The religious 
side of it is rarely presented with the soberness and 
plainness that it deserves. The ill-effect of this, in 
my judgment, is this: that it does not present itself 



93 



to the ordinary mind, as it should ; as the greatest 
and most solemn of our relations. The greatest, 
because it is entered into by our own free-will : and 
the most solemn, because it has the paramount in- 
fluence in our religious growth, always afterwards, 
to the end of life. 

I am about to look at it now, only in its relation 
to the duties and powers of a Christian home. And 
in pursuing the subject, I shall follow the collocation 
of the words of the Prayer-book : that it should be 
entered into reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, 
and in the fear of God. 

I repeat that I look at it only on this one side ; its 
relation to the home that it promises. It is the fail- 
ing of the human understanding, that it is always 
losing sight of ideas, in the machinery that is 
employed, to carry them into effect. In the State, 
and in the Church, we always have need at times to 
get out of the hurry and bustle of the crowd of people 
and things that are, after all, necessary to accomplish 
the ends in view. If we do not, we will, before we 
are aware of it, be found worshipping our own bow 
and spear ; be entirely engrossed in the machinery, 
which w r e have set in motion. Christ himself seems 
to have allowed this infirmity in the race. You 
remember, how often he almost rushed away from 
the noises of men who thronged him, into solitude ; 
and refreshed his spirit in the silences of nature. He 
bids us, in something of the same prudence, to 
become as little children, in going back to the founda- 



94 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



tion-faiths of the life that we are leading here. It 

might be hard to say how man}' men and women are 
losers in this way, in regard to this holy relation, 
but I think that all may take their bearings at times, 
and find advantage in sober reflection. Society just 
now is certainly at war, in many tilings, with any 
effort of two young people, who are about to enter 
into the estate of marriage, if they have a careful 
conscience as to the sober reflections that naturally 
belong to it. Indeed, at the very mention of it in 
this way, the light wit, or what passes for it, is at once 
roused to do its little utmost to dissipate all discreet 
and sober thought. Yea, even some fierceness of 
temper might be roused, as if the only becoming 
method of entering into this bond, must be the 
thoughtless and trifling spirit of the unbelieving 
world. Thus, the plain soberness of the Prayer- 
book, which is in this matter the voice of reason and 
the Bible, often falls on the ears of the youthful Chris- 
tian pair, who stand at the altar, as rather the tone of 
a threatening and over-strained zeal of a past age. I 
hear oftener foolish remarks from this side of the 
subject, than I care to tell. 

Now, marriage, in its relation to the future home, 
and of the immortal souls who are to inhabit that 
home, which is set up with the sounds of so much 
worldly hilarity and romantic thoughtlessness, claims 
a serious consideration at our hands. Here thought- 
lessness is unbelief. It is infidelity to the God who in- 
stituted the rite, and blessed it. It leads to incongru- 



MABBIAGE HONORABLE. 



95 



ity and dissonance at the very start. It perverts the 
judgment People do not think of its responsibilities. 
They must rush into it, lightly and unadvisedly, for 
they have no way of doing otherwise. They are 
careless, as to sober thought of what they are doing ; 
careless by nature, for they are then young, and they 
are easily tempted to take the advice of the multitude 
to throw dull care away. They will not seek nor 
take advice of any older friend, and they must be 
unadvised. Is it at all to be wondered at, if they find 
themselves unprepared for the future trials of each 
other's tempers ; if, in the solemn events which they 
must meet together, they are left to find wisdom as 
they can? Is it to be wondered at, if at this time we 
are continually patching up the rents of society? if the 
voice of the temptress, who glides into every Eden 
that ever was set up, finds them unready to resist her 
guile? if the very form of popular religion has be- 
come the weak effort to stem the torrent of our mis- 
takes in the organization of social life ? if it seems to 
be given up, by common consent, that men can really 
grow up truly religious in happy homes and never 
wander from them ? 

Let us take the words of the service of what is well 
called "the Solemnization of Matrimony" in their or- 
der. 

I. Reverently. It is to be entered into reverently. 
This means, evidently, not now the fear of God, 
for that comes up farther on; but a reverent feel- 
ing, as to the relation itself. If what I have said here- 



96 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



tofore in regard to the sacredness of home, is true, 
then the rite by which that relation is made natural 
and is blessed of the God of nature, becomes of the 
character of a religion. Older disputes in the Chris- 
tian wars of the past leave their dust and grime on 
our holy thoughts. Marriage is not a sacrament. 
Of these there are only two. We want only two seals 
to the charter of the forgiveness of sins ; and for the 
purposes of theological warfare, we have settled 
among ourselves to confine the word to that single 
meaning. It is not a sacrament, for it does not need a 
priest to make it valid in all proper senses. No 
question of any apostolical succession can be allowed 
here. The late events in Europe, of the intolerance 
of the Church of Rome, is final as to the conclusions 
of the next age on this matter. The laws of this State 
are to us conclusive. But it will always call on the 
ministers of religion to ask the blessing of God upon 
it He solemnizes it. Here, indulge me for a mo- 
ment, The marriage service of this Church is gene- 
rally allowed to be sound in construction. If you read 
it carefully, you will find that it does not profess, as 
our common speech does, that a minister marries the 
parties. They marry each other. They do all the 
active part of the marriage. He only stands by, as the 
official, to whom the State has delegated the duty to 
see to it that the laws are obeyed ; and by whom the 
Church has directed, that the blessing of God shall be 
invoked upon them. He sees to it that the require- 
ments of the laws of God and man are complied with. 



97 



He hears the solemn promises, and with prayer and 
benediction proclaims the fact, that they are hence- 
forth, man and wife. This fact throws the solemn 
responsibility in the rite chiefly on them. It belongs 
there. It is a solemn thing. Why ? 

First, to the two considered individually. They 
accept a bond, which was established in the original 
creation of the race— a bond that has its own re- 
sponsibilities, to which all nature bears witness. 
They make a promise to love each other with a love 
which must endure through light and shade, through 
romance and reality, a love that is made the model idea 
of revealed religion. God has made them in such 
wise, that all the duties of the ten commandments of 
His law, are made to take a deeper and nobler mean- 
ing from their example. They are called into the 
secret places of the temple of God, and there learn the 
sublimer obligations of his will. The chiefest ideas 
of the Christian faith; nay, I will just touch on the 
fact, all the religions of the world, that have any 
meaning at all; all the idolatries of the races have re- 
vealed the necessity of this relation to the right under- 
standing of the will of God. We rattle words over 
and over, never thinking where they came from. 
But a world without this relation, would be a world in 
which the Bible would be an enigma. St. Paul had 
this in his mind, when he said: "This is a great mys- 
tery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church." 
We exult in the acts of occasional heroism; when 
some brave man dares every danger, and rescues 
7 



98 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



some stranger to him from death. I read with 
exultation the account of the medals and the votes of 
honor that were given the last year, to the heroes 
who had plunged into rivers, or in one case, the young 
midshipman of the steamer Alaska, who leaped into 
the stormy ocean, to save the common sailor who 
had fallen into it, and I thanked God that I belong 
to a people which can thus touch the hem of Christ's 
garment in such instances of sublime heroism, and can 
feel the divine throbbing so near them. But as the 
angels look at it, the sublime of true courage, the very 
essence of the divine love of God, which brought the 
Saviour of men to earth, is the very element and pabu- 
lum of this calm, quiet relation of home life. If the 
angels of joy gather to hail the marriage of a youth- 
ful pair, the darkly clad messenger of death no less is 
there, to take note of the promises that invoke his 
presence, or defy his might, "till death do us part." 
There are secret societies of men, in which, I am told, 
the promise is made of mutual support and defence, 
in every danger from wrong or violence ; but it is 
always done with one important reservation. This 
sodality allows none. It will have none. It comes to 
a youth, who has all along been in the dreamland of 
soft and selfish romance, whose imagination has been 
thinking of Eden, and of some bank, " whereon 
the wild thyme blows," and the wilder time flies; 
whose most serious meditation in life has been, thus 
far, to take all proper care of himself; whose very 
love of virtue has been reflexive, because it did 



M^RllIAGE RON OR ABLE. 



99 



him good and made him respectable: and it- says 
to him, and the manhood in him hears it with dismay, 
but not with recreant cowardice: " Husbands, love 
your wives, even as Christ loved the church, and gave 
himself for it, that he might sanctify it and cleanse 
it, with the washing of water by the word." "Gave 
himself for it." Suffered and died for it— what that 
means, he will learn, in solemn truth, long after - 
the romance that first played over his imagination 
has fled from earth, to meet him in heaven, 
if he has been true to the promises that he once 
so ignorantly made, with the sweet smell of flowers, 
in his charmed circle of Psyche and Cupid. It is 
because of this deeper meaning of it, that the apostle 
declared it an honorable bond and compact. Its 
heroisms are not rewarded by societies and states 
here; but they take hold on the very marrow 
of the soul of man. They are the glory of the race 
of man. They make the love of God a reality to our 
imaginations. Where that love is the model and 
rule; and it may be, thank God, even where people 
do not study all the theology of their daily acts 
in it, there is a true home. It should be reverently 
considered. 

II. Discreetly, says the Book. There are two 
manifestations of indiscretion, which give me great 
anxiety as to the results : a religious and a social 
error. I am often led to wonder, whether they are 
any way collected. It is not, of course, intentional, 
but I put it to any man : if the idea of the best piety 



IOO THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



prevails, that it is possible to be wild and even 
debauched, in youth, and then in some great and all- 
cleansing excitement, in a few days to get over all 
the ill-effects, all the stains and bruises of the previous 
violations of the laws of God, and become another 
man in Christ Jesus ; yea, and sometimes, I am afraid, 
it would be said, a better man for the previous tragic 
experiences — if this idea becomes once common in 
a community, the question in my mind is, does it 
account for the inclination of young girls to sacrifice 
themselves on the altar of matrimony, for some worth- 
less and dissipated young man, with some such hope 
of him ? There are cases of this misguided infatua- 
tion, when a perfectly sensible girl, one to whose 
judgment we would defer in anything else, manifests 
a blindness here in the most solemn act of her girl- 
hood, that is unaccountable. Tell her that the lover 
is wild, vulgar in his tastes, that his chosen companions 
are of the vilest classes ; that he violates the common 
rules of decency, that she grieves her parents, shames 
her friends, and denies her own womanhood by her 
choice ; and her answer is, " That he has promised 
her to reform. " She is to be the fair Mentor, to 
recall him from the embraces of the syren Calypso, 
who has changed the young Telemachus for a time 
into the form of a beast. In every other relation of 
life, the dictate of common sense would be, to let him 
first reform before you reward him. If your son or 
your brother is in this temper, you wait for him to 
bring forth fruits meet for repentance, before you 



MARRIAGE HONORABLE. 



101 



reward him with your increase of trust. Only in our 
piety and in our " affairs of the heart," do we defy 
nature, and disregard the inflexible law of morals. 

Now, I add one word only. The marriage bond, 
more than any other, requires the grace of discre- 
tion ; that is of the best sense. It has little use for a 
fool, whether one of our common use of the word, or 
of the scriptural meaning : whether a man without 
sense or without virtue. The religious feeling is 
subject to laws. So is the love of the sexes. It is 
to the injury of any community, to allow that either 
is the sport of circumstances. Error in the one is 
pretty certain to be punished by trouble in the other. 
If a debauchee is likely to be changed in one day in 
our Church, in all the deepest principles of his duty 
towards God, is the girl very far wrong, who hopes 
for the same facility of conversion to operate in her 
behalf? The home of the whole life! No words 
can tell its importance to you, to take care that the 
foundation stone of it be laid in the exercise of the 
soundest discretion; to see to it that the choice, 
which is to secure or wreck your happiness for the 
long years of after life, should be one which can bear 
the traversing of all your friends. I know that I am 
running counter to popular notions. I fear that one 
half of you did not do it when your turn came, but 
none the less, I am bound to speak as I think ; that 
the French rule is, in my judgment, far better than 
our own. You may scorn the opinion. I believe 
that the parents have a right to fight off the disasters 



102 THE CHUMCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



of their children, not to say their own distresses in 
their children, by every means in their power. At 
all events, let the word of advice be duly considered 
by those to whom it is of interest It can do no 
harm, to intend, at least, not to begin wrong. Let 
the discretion in your choice be that which we can 
all admit. 

III. Advisedly. That is, taking advice of friends. 
Individuality runs to seed w r hen a member of a 
family violently disrupts the family ties, and makes a 
choice that is offensive to the other members of the 
same. I do not question the right to do this. 
I do not question the rigJit to pursue any call- 
ing, even the lowest. The right is not the thing 
in question, at all. I speak of the fact, and of that 
only. There is a logic of facts, which the world 
always uses more than the young think. For in- 
stance, you choose feeble associates, beggarly minds, 
shabby companions. They are not very bad. They 
are not very anything. They are simply beneath 
you. Their tastes are vulgar. Their associations 
are all low. You go down to them. V ery well, if 
you like it. You have the legal right to do it. Only 
do not complain if those of your own blood and your 
own circle, who had some rights in you, do not 
choose to accept your self-willed choice, as theirs, 
and go down with you. There are marriages that 
are not wrong. They are only mean. They are 
not sinful — only terrible mistakes. They are selfish, 
and that of the most shabby kind of selfishness. 



MARRIAGE HONORABLE. 



103 



" Oh ! but would one hesitate in trusting to the in- 
fallibility of a first loveT That is just what I am 
doing. The infallibility of the first love, is the 
weakest of our beliefs. It is the creed of puerility. 
It is the whipt syllabub of our meanest literature. 
Let me, in a word, commend all its apostles and 
catechumens, to get by heart the first half-dozen 
chapters of the novel of Pendennis, by Thackeray. 
They are the very Augsburg Confession of good 
sense on this subject. 

Your friends have rights in you. You may deny 
them; but you cannot get rid of them. You are 
to build up your home with many a stick of timber, 
that you will take from the homes of the members 
of your own family. Have they no rights of love, 
in the selection of its site ? You cannot, unless with 
rude unkindness and ingratitude, cut the ties of 
nature, and set up a roof-tree in forgetfulness of the 
many kindnesses of the past. You ought not to try 
to do it. I know that there may be all manner of 
mistakes made by friends in giving advice, in such 
cases. That is to be taken into consideration. But 
the rule is still, that the rite demands that if is to be 
done, advisedly. 

> IV. Soberly, This is a special word. The others 
do not cover it. The passions of youth are to be 
set aside, as far as may be. Probably, no inexperi- 
enced person here looks at the matter of marriage in 
the light of sober experience. I am glad that they 
do not. They ought not. It is unnatural that they 



104 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



should. The glow and halo of romance is as natural 
to our youth as it is lovely. It gives a charm to our 
early days, which I for one would not in any way 
dim the force of. But it needs sobering as to the 
dangers of a mistaken choice, or the young man or 
woman may soon wake up to the gloomy and stupe- 
fying knowledge that they have wasted the best 
affection of the heart upon an unworthy object. 
This is the soberness that is required. In this the 
wisdom of parents, or of older friends, is of inestima- 
ble advantage. The judgment of the parties is then, 
from the nature of the case, the most at fault. It is 
the more likely to be at fault by the ardency of the 
affections and the vivacity of the imagination. 
It is often sadly and ruinously faulty. There- 
fore, there is always need of the exhortation 
to soberness ; to the coolest judgment ; to that 
very exercise of a sound sense, which is the more 
needed the more we reluct against it. 

V. And lastly. The rite demands the fear of 
God, Society murmurs this day, in all the little bays 
and coves of family life, because of the indifference to 
this requirement. An ideal home is oftener a dream 
than a reality. God never forgets the rules which 
he has appointed. He is as jealous as a lover 
over us. If He has meant our good, and we have 
disappointed Him, what wonder if He puts the means 
of recalling us to our first love, by allowing us, in our 
other loves, to reap the present discomfort of our 
folly ; and in vain regrets over a broken covenant, 



105 



keeps us to the faith in a home above. There are 
laws which God has set for us, in the establishment 
of a home here, which cannot be violated, without 
loss, every day of life. A father sometimes says to 
me : " The promise is not kept with me : Train up a 
child and he will not go wrong." But the father 
begun wrong. He trained him wrong. He violated 
some law of the Creator, at the first. He has been 
reaping just what he himself most diligently or most 
carelessly sowed. There are valleys in the State of 
Massachusetts, wherein every family that has ever 
lived in them has been the victim of the disease of con- 
sumption. If a man chooses to place his home there, 
in the cold clammy fogs of such fenny dells, has he 
any right to complain of the Bible if he sees his 
children smitten down ? We say, no. 

There are valleys in Church life, where bogs and 
quicksands are to be found. The moral air is filled 
with fogs and damp, and the spiritual health is 
endangered. Men may not build their homes in such, 
and expect that they can avoid the consequences 
of their own folly. The promises of God in religion 
as in nature, require on our part the previous condi- 
tions of sacred obedience to all His laws. 

What then are these -laws? And what is this fear 
of God ? 

I. Health. In the matter of a home, the body is 
a religious consideration. It is the temple of the 
only incarnation that we know in these days, the 
temple of the Holy Ghost. It is a religious duty, to 



106 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



remember it always ; much more in the serious 
duties of home life. You must not despise it. Monks 
and hermits set themselves for ages to try and ruin it, 
or go counter to it in the ways of religion. It took 
revenge on them in dreams and fancies of the horri- 
ble, which had their origin in distempered brains and 
deranged nerves. Of course, you will not understand 
me as trying to determine the rules of any particu- 
lar cases. That each man and woman must do for 
himself or herself. Let us allow the general truth, and 
do our share in applauding the courage that can stem 
the forces of the day, in trying to do right. 

II. Equality of position, is best. I hardly like 
to call it a law of God, and yet I recall the fact that, 
when God did interfere in the matter, he did so in this 
very line. The Israelites were commanded to marry 
in their tribes. Probably they soon did so almost 
entirely, by choice and sound reason. The home 
which is to mould two minds into one, which marriage 
does, if normal, may sometimes do it against 
the grain. But why run such risks, to gain a lower 
good? The poem of "Maud Muller," and the senti- 
mental sigh of, " what might have been" is scattered 
to the winds by the taunting satirist, who raises 
the opposite cry, of things that ought not to be. The 
things that ought not to be, you may depend upon 
it, gain the day in the long run. Money is often 
the disturbing element, in these calculations. 
We think that we Americans are always to be the 
novel people of the civilized world; that we can marry 



MABM1A GE 



EO NOB ABLE. 



107 



up or down, hither and yon, as we please. Time 
will cure us of the notion. We have still a large 
share of human nature in our systems. The love 
of money is one thing. It is often a bad thing. But 
the education that money can give; the refinements, 
which it often secures, are facts, which cannot 
be denied. The advice that I offer, has nothing to 
do with it, of necessity. There are the rich vulgar as 
well as the poor vulgar. The up and down, of which 
I speak, is in the education and the relative refine- 
ment or coarseness of people, Let the bond which 
is to last for life be woven of the same materials 
that enter into the life every day. Female sym- 
pathy and imagination lead some of the giddy 
.astray after that which is wild and striking. The 
sentimental fancies of a stupid and godless literature, 
are the constant heresies of vain and conceited peo- 
ple. But the instances of fatal error are few. They 
stand wide apart. Good sense guides the majority 
of our youth to the right choice. 

III. Unity of faith, is certainly most desirable. I 
would fain enlarge on this thought, but my time has 
expired. Unity of faith need not be formal same- 
ness in all particulars. Often it is with faith, that the 
party cannot change an hereditary education, of 
belief without loss. But the ideal home surely 
requires the full sympathetic bond of oneness in the 
deeper religious thought of the parents. God send 
His blessing upon all the homes to which you now 
go. Let us value them, as the first of blessings. 



108 THE CHUBOH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

Let us look at them in the light of the last home, 
to which they are giving meaning every day ; and 
so polish them by frequent prayer and constant 
thoughtfulness, that, as David said, the Lord may 
" bless them and us out of Zion." 



VII. 



UNHAPPY HOMES. 



" What shall be given unto thee ? or what shall be done unto thee, 
thou false tongue ? Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juni- 
per. Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents 
of Kedar. My soul hath long dwelt among them that are the enemies 
of peace. — Psalm cxx. 3-5. {Psalter translation.) 

FALSE tongue, a quarrelsome family, 
and an unhappy home, have often been 
the linked causes of human misery. As 
one wanders up and down our streets 
and beholds the extraordinary conveniences that we 
have collected together in our modes of living, how 
far his judgment may be at fault as to the real 
enjoyments of life — as to the sum of happiness 
within. Probably only the physicians and the 
ministers of religion may know the truth. Novels 
have intruded somewhat into the limits of ordinary 
life, and now and then they construct some pictures 
of family scenes that are not altogether imaginary. 
But the novel must always please, and the subject is 
not altogether pleasing. The reader will soon tire 
of the tale of fiction, unless the strain of his sympa- 




IIO THE CHUB OH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



thies be removed in obedience to the unities and no 
less to the inclinations of his desire to be pleased. 
Therefore the novel must be delusive and false to the 
dreary facts. It is different in the reality. The 
people in the unhappy homes cannot shut the dull 
volume of their wretched lives at will, or create the 
polite and compensating rewards that seem so sweet 
and proper at the beck of the fancy of the author. 
Think of it. A young man has been educated in 
all manner of knowledge of the classics and the 
sciences, except those of common things. He has 
been taught in church all the nice points of polemics, 
and is able to dispute in all the old divinities which 
have perished forever from daily life. He has read 
the poets, and wasted tears of tender sentiment on 
the imaginary woes, and thrilled with interest in 
tracing to a delightful conclusion the perplexities of 
crowds of ideals of the brave youth and afflicted 
maiden, which are the stock characters of the novelist 
Lapped in the soft sentimental selfishness of his time 
of life, he has accepted certain ugly facts of his own 
experience as the passing accidents of a day. That 
sort of thing is to his mind only the trifling ruffle on 
the surface. He soon comes to his turn, and enters 
into the responsibilities of a family with as little 
notion of the laws of living, and as wrong notions of 
the wisdom which is necessary to secure his own 
happiness and that of those who are committed to 
his charge as if he had set out in the beginning to 
effect that unlucky innocence by design. Often too 



UNHAPPY HOMES, 



III 



the tenderness of parental love has a sort of fatuity 
in keeping from the children the information most 
necessary to their future success in making a happy 
home. The father is too generous to let the rough 
wind blow upon his children ; when the rough wind 
is as necessary to their health of mind as the open 
air is to the health of the body. They grow up, 
surrounded by their mistaken affection, as hot-house 
plants. The moment a serious trouble meets them 
they wilt and droop before it. The mother toils and 
slaves herself to keep her girls in elegant idleness and 
to teach them the most refined and fatal selfishness. 
The manners of society combine to produce the same 
effects, which shall, at last, send two young people 
out on the voyage on the retu-rnless sea of real life, 
with no proper and sober knowledge of its toils and 
dangers. It was not without reason that our Bibles 
contain so many warnings to the rich; that the 
Oriental hyperbole was so often made to do service 
in denouncing the woes which follow in the track of 
those who have wealth enough to develope the 
futility of the rational plans of the unsanctified un- 
derstanding. Therefore, as we think of these homes 
of ours (and who can ask more than has been done 
for them in material advantages), let us spend a little 
time in looking at the unpleasant facts which beset 
them. 

David seems to have found his experience of some 
of these facts to have been very bitter. " Woe is me, 
that I sojourn in Meshech, and am dwelling in the 



112 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



tents of Kedar." Some commentators are shrewd in 
determining the exact time the king of Israel was in 
passing trouble in some of his wanderings, and they 
tell us where the land of Mesech was, and mark a 
period when the fugitive found a brief refuge in the 
black tents of the wandering Bedawin. But the 
probability is that the writer of this Psalm was think- 
ing of no such thing. The explanations all seem to 
me to fall to the ground. I am glad they do. It 
seems to me that whoever wrote this psalm, has 
merely used the names in the usual poetic sense.* 
We may use them exactly as he did. For some 
reason, his home was to him as the heathen habita- 
tions and the black tents of the Arabs. There he 
must dwell. He could not escape from the gloomy 
evils that haunted him, that sat with him at his daily 
meals and perched on the posts of his couch at 
night. 

If David was the writer, then it is the uplifting the 
vail for a moment that covered a gloomy fact, which 
I firmly believe to have always existed, in the house 
of the husband of Uriah's widow. Let me briefly 
refer to that incident. While Uriah was living, 
Absalom was the heir-expectant of the throne of 
David by many fair rights, as things went in that 
rude age. You remember that the prophet had fore- 
warned the sinful king, that his punishment would 

* "They stand here for remote barbarous hordes. Similarly we 
should speak (De Wette) of a dwelling with Turks and Hottentots." 

Speaker's Com. 



UNHAPPY HOMES, 



113 



follow in the line of his sin. It did — in a most 
gloomy sense, it did.* But, think of the daily life 
and thoughts of the young man Absalom in that 
polygamous household. Talented, witty, energetic, 
and the warlike idol of the younger men of his tribe, 
the admired of the women of Israel, nothing would 
bar his way to the supreme power, but the conse- 
quences of the fatal sin of his father. The sin removed 
his reverence for David; the consequences, excited 
his daily hatred. The home which contained Absalom 
and Solomon, could not have been far different from 
the tents of the wild and revengeful Arabs of Kedar. 
And how could the wretched king remove it ? How 
could he purify it of the stains of his own guilt ? It 
teemed with the threatening^ of fate. It grew darker 
daily before his sight. The devils of deceit and mur- 
derous passions took up their dwelling under his roof, 
as they had once in his heart, and he must see them 
working their accursed mission, in spite of him. He 
may wail, and repent But the repentance of that 

♦"Thus the subsequent troubles which Ammon, Absalom and 
Adonijah brought into David's house— and they were the only ones 
which temporarily clouded the clear sky in which his star shone— were 
all of them connected with this fundamental wrong (of polygamy), 
and on the same thread hung many of the evils which were felt under 
David's successors. * * * Absalom was David's third son (of his second 
son we never hear anything, and therefore conclude that he was a 
person of no importance), and moreover his mother was not of plebeian 
origin, like David's other wives, but the daughter of the King of Ge- 
shur. He was a man of daring character, and inherited from his 
father nothing but his regal pride."— Ewald, Hist, of Israel, Vol. III. 
p. 171. 

8 



114 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



covenant of eternal Law did not mislead him. He 
must bear the consequences of his deeds. He had 
made that home for himself ; he must dwell in it as it 
was. I can easily imagine that the Mesech and Kedar 
of the text were not necessarily outside the walls of 
Mount Zion. 

Let us turn from him to the homes here. I have 
more than once, in these discourses, identified the 
Garden of Eden with the homes of men. I think the 
Bible is of wonderful beauty ; that it admits of this use 
and application. The young seek, with desperate 
will, to dwell in that garden, and make that innocence 
and love a reality. The atmosphere which be- 
witches them is that of the land of sacred romance, 
where the lion, for them lies down with the lamb ; 
where the laws of nature soften their accustomed 
rules in their behalf. At any rate, I sympathize with 
all the young who do this thing. It is the delusion 
of innocence, and the innocence is its excuse. But 
the serpent comes into every garden and his invaria- 
ble work of evil is now, as it was in the beginning, to 
plant in one sin ; to create a lie in the centre of the 
paradise which we set up. God alone can intercept 
the ruin and drive us to repentance, and lead to 
hopes of a Paradise in the far future, to atone for the 
loss of this. This sob of David begins with the 
denunciation of falsehood: " Woe is me !" Because 
of the false tongue. What shall be done to it? 
" Sharp arrows and hot coals of Juniper." False 
tongues which are armed with permanent causes of 



UNHAPPY HOMES. 



115 



discord, and unhappy homes, are ever the causes 
of human misery. Under their malign influences the 
Eden dries up and becomes the haunt of the satyr and 
the owl. There is no peace in them, and there is no 
escape from them. The dream of youth goes out in 
shame and disgust, and the garden changes gradually 
into the hated tents of Kedar. 

Home must be built on absolute truth, on solid 
character. I do not mean the surface truth of the 
tongue. I do not give room to the question, of how 
much of the soft nothings of outside courtesy to 
strangers is to be transplanted into the family. I am 
not thinking of it. Nor do I mean the truth of the 
tribe of the bears, the silly bluntness of rudesbys, 
which is often as injurious in its stupidity as it is 
rough in its application. The coordinate and com- 
pensating quality to the truth I am thinking of, is per- 
fect confidence and entire trustfulness in a family. This 
is, I think, the perfect love that casteth out fear, of 
which the apostle St. John speaks. It finds its way 
into the Church from the family, and there it is puri- 
fied and consecrated, and then returned to the family. 
It is the absolute truth of conduct, which St. Peter, 
has in mind, when he exhorts wives to trust to win 
their ungodly husbands, by their " chaste conversa- 
tion," or manner of life. It is something different 
from mere truth in words. The latter follows from 
it Now, truth of conduct, is the truth of the whole 
man. It requires the whole man. No part can be 
left out If a man is ninety and nine-hundreths of 



Il6 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



him in the circle of the fold of salvation, and ripe for 
Heaven, I beg him to take more care of that last 
fraction, which is outside, than of all the ninety and 
nine at home. It were better to have a body all in 
perfect health, and only a vile, little spot in the integu- 
ment of the heel, punctured to the quick with the 
poison of the cobra, than to have a life with one black 
poison lie in it Here I could spend an hour in 
denouncing the abominations of the false professors 
of religion, in all the degrees up and down, from the 
pretentious charities of the assemblies to the small, 
mean deceits of the lowest underling in them. But 
that some other time. Truth of conduct is the work 
of life. It is the great w r ork of life. In my judg- 
ment, the Almighty has made the covenant signs of 
the Church as plain as he has, in order to prevent all 
manner of delay of the conscience on them. He will 
leave us all our time to consecrating the life, to work- 
ing down into the deceitful heart and letting the 
light of His Spirit into its unwholesome gloom. I 
like the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, as a 
moral force, because it takes the mystery of questions 
of sacred privilege altogether out of the way, and 
leaves the tremendous truth uppermost, that the whole 
man must be pure as God is pure : true, as God is 
true, if he would be at peace with and see God. Ask 
a man, Were you really converted ? He may be 
half his life settling that question. Nine-tenths of the 
moral perplexities of the denominations around us 
are centered on the acknowledged difficulties of their 



UNHAPPY HOMES. II J 

methods of self-examination on that elementary ques- 
tion. But ask him, have you been baptized, and 
made a member of the contingent covenant, which 
avails nobody save as they keep it, and the answer is 
prompt, and the fearful contingency comes uppermost 
at once. He must be what he professes, or his pro- 
fession amounts to nothing. And home is the place 
where he is to work out that problem. 

Truth between husband and wife, between parents 
and children, or to take the other word, confidence, 
must be perfect, or the end, sooner or later, is sorrow, 
division and hatred. Without this foundation-stone, 
the house is built on the shifting sand. One has 
only to take up any evening paper, to see the wrecks 
which frightfully illustrate the truth of this law. The 
vulgar pairs who have no better sense or taste than 
to drag their household troubles into the view of the 
world, at least show us the diseases, which others 
with better taste, or less courage, hide and bear in 
secret sorrow. We are all bound up in the same 
bundle of life. The diseases of our city air are 
endemical. No kind of walls will exempt us from 
our share of them. No wealth can buy exception. 
Now, the radical evil, the original sin at the bottom 
of most of these sorrows, is want of truth. I do not 
speak now of that great falsehood and wrong, which 
destroys the tie and bond of the family altogether, 
but only of those lesser lies, which prevent the confi- 
dence, which is necessary to happiness. God has so 
constituted us, that this confidence is as necessary to 



1 1 8 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the success of the family, as the very vital heat 
which keeps them in health. The want of it is the 
beginning of misconception and wrong judgments. 
It is all well enough for a man to quote the proverb, 
■ about the choice between dwelling upon the house- 
top, and with a contentious woman but the wrong 
is quite as often with the man as with the woman. 
On the woman comes usually the burden of the 
trouble of the family. The duty of the husband is 
that of the nobler sort, to anticipate this law and 
burden, and resolutely to take his share of it. If he 
is false, if the mutual ardor of the innocent days of 
the lovers degenerates into selfish and careless 
thought for himself alone, then the whole course 
of life is disarranged at once. The best that can be 
hoped for the two, is, that they will settle down each 
into his or her way of fretful indifference, and leave 
the other alone, for the most part. They find, as 
Eve did with her Eden, that the serpent has robbed 
their garden of its light and beauty, and given them 
only the wilderness in its place. The evil is that this 
state of tilings is itself a lie. 

Eden is written on the outside of the flag which 
waves in the wind : within, it is Mesech and Kedar. 
It is a degrading sham. It is the very denial of the 
wedded love which the union symbolizes. The two 
are in a yoke, which means unity of purpose. They 
have none, and they must pretend to have it The 
pretence is pregnant with evil. It invites deceit. It 
teaches a false mode of bearing the troubles of life. 



VNBAPPY HOMES. 



II 9 



Their very virtues become hollow — their religion is a 
mere tinsel. The burdens which mutual sympathy 
could lighten for each other, which love would trans- 
mute into the means of grace to each other, by 
inciting the will and rousing the nobler soul to accept 
them with the enthusiasm of faith, are left in all their 
coarseness and unrelieved weight. They are left 
dull, monotonous and hateful. No man can live 
without the help of the imagination. It mingles in 
every day's doings. It is the "walking by the 
Spirit." It sweetens toil with dreams, which, whether 
they ever come true or not, are the strength and 
solace of the passing hour. You prove this in every- 
thing. It is the incitement of all good men. Take 
two gamesters, who have been married under false 
pretences. Is there any more gloomy picture of 
wretchedness than they present when they are found 
out by each other ? The light of the little esteem 
in which they had seen each other has gone out 
They are like the shabby stage of the theatre after 
the play is over. The glamour is gone. What is left 
is hateful and mean. So are the homes that are 
built on any of the lies of the wicked world. The 
people in them are like actors, and the acting is 
poor, and it does not pay. They are afraid of the 
hisses of the audience, and they see the audience 
tired of them. 

How many of us there may be, who dwell in the 
streets of Vanity Fair ; in 'the tents of Kedar ; who 
is to tell. It would be almost as dangerous to 



120 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



number them, as it was for David to take the census 
of the tribes of Israel. The satirist dips his pen in 
the gall of bitterness, as he sneers at the vanity of 
society, the falsehoods which pass current, the washed 
gold and counterfeits of the public market. It is not 
my duty, even to fancy how many such unhappy 
people may be found in any given ward. I speak to 
those whom I suppose to believe, that the search for 
good is not to be lightly given up, and that the 
truth can make men free from the chains of the 
devil. The root-evil of home troubles is not, as it is* 
often claimed by the sentimental, the want of that 
airy and mystical love of Damon and Dora, for 
which the fates are responsible ; but the want of that 
radical truth and homespun honesty, which is spun 
often in tears, in the loom of common interests and 
mutual confidence, and which lasts long after the 
bridal dress has turned yellow with age. I for one 
believe, that the ordinary experience of the vast army 
of the saints, who reach the higher shore, is much 
the same. Abraham, in his way, began it for them. 
The time came to him when his Isaac antagonized 
his Ishmael ; and the saint required the confession of 
the inconsistencies of the sinner. And they mostly 
find his footsteps placed before them. As he saw 
the light of early hope sinking in the dusty clouds 
of the deserts in which he always wandered, and at 
last saw in this continual remove the lesson of his 
earthly disappointment, the supernal light of heaven 
slowly taking the place of the Eden which he had 



UNHAPPY HOMES. 



121 



lost here; so has it always been, and will be to 
the end. The truth of character is the only sound 
basis of any religious faith. 

I always find myself looking beneath what men 
think that they believe, to what their life-marks of 
face tell that they really are believing. Would that 
I could impart, by any words of mine, the conviction, 
that there is no escape from misery for those who 
do not believe and practice the truth of character, 
on which the home of this world is to be built, and 
that of the other inherited. Burn the false tongue 
on coals of juniper. If David had been an American, 
he would have said, of resinous pine. As it is, he is 
in favor of the hottest fire that was known to him. 
But at any cost, let the house be founded in truth ; 
in unpleasant truth, if need be. At all events, never, 
in any case, believe that any specious hidden lie is 
ever better than the truth. The rivulets which make 
the pool of the Church must be clear, if the pool is 
to reflect heaven to your eyes. False styles of 
living; expenses that you have no right to incur, 
excesses in the very largesses of charity, excesses of 
hospitality; the vanity of admiration for generous 
public-spirit ; they are all alike, the very baits of the 
devil, if they tempt a man to infuse into his daily 
life, that which will sooner or later become a lie. 
I can recall a shock which I once received as a youth 
in the days of the simple faith that all things are 
what they seem ; in wondering at the wealth of a 
chance host * and dreaming wild dreams of his 



122 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



happiness ; and the next day, learning that he did 
not dare to go beyond his door-step, for fear of his 
creditors. How mean did it all seem, the moment 
the faith in him died out. And it is mean and 
shabby ; this poor pretence to culture and art and 
piety ; this loud profession of a peace that passes 
understanding, when there is no peace to the wicked. 
Come out of Mesech. Flee away from Kedar. Deny 
the devil, hid in the soft silks and laces of fashion, 
and he will flee from you. Whether you join a 
church or not, be true to each other, as you have 
souls to be saved by truth alone. Of course I 
believe in the Church ; I believe in using a ladder, 
when I wish to climb. But I do not expect the 
ladder to make me any other man than I am, when 
I begin to climb. Dr. South said, that no man ever 
went to heaven whose heart was not there before. I 
vary it for the moment, that no man ever goes to 
heaven, who has not found it in his heart and home, 
before he gets there. The Church is the interlinking 
of all our homes, the reminder of the gentle charities 
in which they all exist; but the homes themselves 
must be pure, or the linking them together does no 
good. If your troubles of life are very heavy, if the 
brightness of the sunshine has passed by, and you 
are in the shadow, and the whole world is becoming 
coarse and mean ; if you find the heart answering, 
" Woe is me, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar ;-" 
look to it, my brother, if the blame be not your own. 
The true sign of repentance, in my judgment, is 



UNHAPPY HOMES. 



123 



always the willingness to take up the blame of one's 
own deeds. David was half forgiven, when he began 
to say, i Against thee only have I sinned/ There is 
no need in all the universe of the Almighty for the 
misanthrope, or the maudlin. They are not altogether 
sane in their despair. There are evils which we 
cannot cure; but there are none that we cannot 
confess to ourselves and set us right manfully to 
endure. Grant that the bower of earthly bliss has 
been in many things a mistake. You are not the 
all-peaceful man, ruling successfully the destinies of 
those belonging to you. You have a skeleton in the 
house; and it will walk at night, and show to you 
the proofs of your follies and sins. Well ! rise and 
meet it : talk to it : face it in the belief, that there is 
a God, and a heaven worth trusting to. The one 
great battle of life, I tell you truly, is the fight of 
faith in the truth. You must fight it, not at the 
stake, with the glamour of a Catholic Church, shining 
like an aureole about your head. But you and I 
must lay down the scheme of the campaign in our 
homes, and labor there till we drive the foul spirits 
of lies out of them. Grant that you have erred ; 
that you yourself began the evil course which has 
educated an Absalom in your own house. Grant 
that the falsehoods of the world have become en- 
trenched in the recesses of your family. It has 
made you a tyrant, instead of a loving man. It has 
made your wife a renegade and a sneak, instead of a 
lovely messenger of truth to you. It has raised the 



124 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



children to be anything rather than olive branches 
round about your table. They have learned deceits 
by inheritance. They wrangle and backbite each 
other. Talk of religion — it's all you can expect, to 
bear up with your sorrows and not curse God and 
die. You can echo the text to the syllable : " Woe 
is me that I am constrained to dwell as I do and 
where I am." Grant all this, and intensify it as you 
will ; what then ? If you are bankrupt in business, 
you change the whole manner of your life down to 
the foundation. You begin again, from the begin- 
ning, and renew your toil in order to live. And is 
there any bankruptcy like this, that the one great 
gift of God has turned to dust in your keeping ? 
Yet on this critical point turns the question of your 
manhood, yea, in due course, of your salvation. 
Here is the grand field of the true conversion. 

Here Jacob, as I read his story, takes the scene 
from the father of the faithful. That night, when the 
terrible news reached him, that Esau and four hun- 
dred wild Arabs were on their way to meet him, quite 
too many for a fraternal greeting, he sent up his wail 
of "Woe is me, my sins are at last finding me out." 
But he would not fly from the meeting, and God 
met him, and contended with him in the long dark 
hours of his agony, and gave him his title of Israel, a 
Prince of God, in honor of his daring to go on and face 
the consequences of his misdeeds ; but left him a crip- 
ple for life, that he and we shoul'd never forget that 
repentance is never to be compared with innocence. 



UNHAPPY HOMES. 



125 



If you must limp with Jacob ; if you must bear a 
secret sorrow to the grave, do it and fear not There 
is another world to explain the troubles of this one. 
There must be another home somewhere, to justify 
repentance here. Jacob, you remember, called the 
place where he halted on his thigh ; that is, where 
he began to go as a cripple, towards the fierce hordes 
of Esau, Penuel, for there " He had seen God face to 
face, and his life was preserved. ,, Believe it, it is 
just here that the compassions of the infinite Father 
fail not. For David, as he mused on the matter of 
Uriah, and its fatal influence on Ammon and Absa- 
lom, and through them on his home : for you, if 
your thoughts run in the same line and your repent- 
ings are kindled within you ; for us all, as we cogi- 
tate these great problems of life, these words of the 
poet may convey a true lesson. They are worth 
remembering : 

" From age to age descends unchecked 

The sad bequest of sire to son, 

The body's taint, the mind's defect, 
Through every web of life the dark threads run, 

" Oh why and whither? — God knows all : 
I only know that He is good, 
And that whatsoever may befall, 
# Or here or there, must be the best that could.' 1 



VIII. 

HOME-RELIGION. 



" Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out 
of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, rivers of 
waters in the streets. Let them be thine own, and not strangers' with 
thee. Let thy fountain be blessed ; and rejoice with the wife of thy 
youth"— Proverbs v. 15-18. 

UCH texts as this seem to strike on the 
common ear as somehow foreign to the 
Christian sentiment. We give them up as 
belonging to the blindness of Judaism ; the selfishness 
of the unregenerate or half regenerate heart ; as 
things at which God winked, because of the necessary 
infirmities of men. In other words, there is a jar in 
our common conception, between the Old Testament 
wisdom and that of the New. If it is a real discrep- 
ancy, we must accept it, and make the best* of it. 
But is it so ? I feel that the dissonance is not in the 
Bible, but in ourselves: and as I propose now to use 
this conservative wisdom as the right lesson to be 
taught Christians, as it was once the proper thing 




H0ME-BEL1G10N. 



127 



for Jews, I call your attention, for a moment, to some 
facts about Christianity, that bear on this subject. 

Christianity, for fifteen and a half centuries, was 
molded almost entirely by bachelors and celibates. 
An ideal home, as a religious thing, which should be 
worthy of the ambition of godly people, and which 
should give opportunity for the culture of the high- 
est graces of the perfect Christian character, was 
unknown. The great body of early Christian 
literature looks the other way. Celibacy was the 
ideal perfection. We are affected by this fact, far 
more than we are apt to imagine. 

I. The apostles were men so persecuted, that the 
advice of the wanderer Paul, that all who could 
should remain in the single state, was, for the time, 
the dictate of common sense and true kindness. 
When men were dragged to the most cruel forms of 
death, without reason or law, by mobs or by tyrants, 
it was well that they should have as few dependants 
to lament them as possible. A man who might at 
any time be killed, and had the greatest number of 
chances that he would be in a year or so, would find 
all the kind and true dictates of his heart prompting 
him to keep himself as disentangled as possible from 
the ties of nature. There was one thing more, to 
which I can only allude, and pass it. The homes of 
men, in that age, had become so utterly polluted by 
sensuality and fraud, that their very religion was 
foul with the black stains of the prevailing corruption. 
Alongside of the sensual aye ska of India to-day, you 



128 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



find the ascetic dervish ; alongside the disreputable 
looseness of European society, in Catholic countries, 
you have the convent and the monk. There is a 
social reaction which regulates these things, that is 
as fixed as the laws of nature. The early enthusiasts 
in the Church found no escape from the pollution 
that was in the world through lust, except in the 
loneliness of the convent and the cave of the hermit. 

II. Therefore, when the pagan persecutions ceased, 
at the early part of the fourth century, the error was 
intrenched in the citadel of the dogmatic life of the 
Church. The life of home was secular. The reli- 
gions, by a proud, unhappy distinction, were the 
monks and hermits. There were two temptations 
existing in the Church, which helped to continue 
this state of things. One was that the priests of the 
spiritual faith needed the sacred awe, which, from 
the beginning of history, belonged to the sacerdotal 
character. It, and it alone, could impress the rude 
crowd of semi-barbarians or whole savages, with re- 
spect, and command their obedience. The other 
was the fact that as the first duties of those ages 
were to spread abroad, as rapidly as possible, the 
benign influences of the faith among uncivilized 
nations, it was evident that the missionaries, whether 
alone, or as in the case in England, in colonies, could 
move more rapidly and influence others more effect- 
ually as single men than when they might be 
impeded with families. It was with them then as it 
is now with the garrison of a remote post among 



H0ME-BELIG10K 



129 



wild Indians. What was in the mouth of St. Paul 
the dictate of common sense, afterwards came to be 
thought the inspired law of the heroic Church. 

III. Then, again, in the dark ages it became the 
fixed and unchangeable custom. It is foolish in us 
now to ignore the fact, that the medieval Church did 
do a great work in the dark ages. She did it prob- 
ably as well as the circumstances allowed. But she 
did it with the loss of home virtues. She did it with 
some partial perversions of the Christian life. Her 
scheme tumbled the edifice on her own head. The 
epoch of her punishment was marked when the cry 
came up from almost all Christendom, for the sup- 
pression of the convents and monasteries. The 
Reformation was an assertion of the necessity of 
something better than the monastery afforded. The 
marriage of Luther to a nun, was the logic of the 
age. It committed the new movement to the faith, 
that there can be no higher life than the ' secular/ at 
which men had been taught to sneer. 

The necessities of the times perpetuated some of 
the influences of this evil notion of the dark ages. 
Dogmatic theology required the existence among 
protestants of a large body of learned men, to defend 
the positions of the reformers. These scholars were 
generally poor. The advantages of the universities 
were obtained by them, only by that studious life of 
the bookworm, which made the home life rather 
an obstruction than a help. They either did not 
marry, or often carried into the estate less knowledge 
Q 



130 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



of the duties of it, than of Greek particles. So then, 
in the face of these facts, I say again, the Christianity 
which we have received, may give us something of a 
discord, in the two tones of the old and the new 
covenants, and still the covenants themselves may 
be in unison. The conservatism of the heart is 
holier and better than the scholasticism of papist or 
protestant The jealous guardianship of its secret 
life is essential to the best interests of true religion. 

It is this truth which has been covered over, in the 
long history of Christianity. We now by habit look 
at the duties, and pleasures, and teachings of home as 
those of ' the old Adam.' The true, religious per- 
son is still supposed to be the one living in the absorp- 
tion of public duties. Societies, crusades, missions, 
committees for this and that object, these are religious : 
the things which make a man or a woman better and 
more dutiful in life, these are either left to the chance 
enthusiasm of individuals, or they vegetate as they 
may, uncheered by the teachers of religion. 

The text seems to be selfish. Those words in it : 
thine own cistern ; thine own well ; and the precept, 
let them be thine own : How, it may be asked, are 
they compatible with the universal charity of the 
Gospel? How can we love others as ourself, and 
withhold anything from them ? Is not charity the 
bond of all the virtues ? Is not this precept the dead- 
ness of the old law ? I think not. I believe that it 
is time for men to consider some of the old wisdom 
as quite equal to the unauthorized inferences of theo- 



HOME-RELIGION. 1 3 1 

rists of the new, even if they seem venerable from age. 
There is a zeal without knowledge. There is a piety 
run mad. There is nothing in the gospel which con- 
flicts with one's duty to himself, or in any way 
crosses the wisdom of the inspired precept : " Let thy 
fountains be dispersed abroad, as rivers of waters in 
the streets, and let them be only thine own, and not 
a stranger's with thee." To keep their water pure for 
the refreshment of others, let the spring-head be 
walled around and covered over from rough intruders. 
Then guard it strictly from the approaches of all 
manner of cattle. The contrary course is as foolish 
in matters of character, as it is in the natural econ- 
omy. 

I. I assert then, that home is a sacred institution, 
not to be lightly surrendered. I carry my thought 
now so far, that I do not except boarding-schools. 
It is not a matter of equal balance, in a parent's mind, 
whether a boy or girl shall be put in another set of 
circumstances than his home in which he was born. 
Before any one may think that I am about to offend 
their prejudices, let me say, that I have a right to 
speak, in this matter, from experience. I believe that 
in my own case, my parents thought that they were 
doing the best thing for me. I rather suspect they did 
do the best thing. I do not blame their memory, 
that I was sent from home for education. Shielded 
by this confession, I hope I may say what I think on 
this subject, without unnecessary sensitiveness on the 
part of any hearer. There are often. I know, good 



132 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



reasons why a child should go from home. And 
boarding-schools are varied in their excellence. They 
are not quite conventual in their discipline. But all 
that does not take away from the truth, that gene- 
rally and normally the first and best place for a boy 
or girl, but certainly for a girl, is the home of her 
birth. If there were no other objection to them and 
to all other institutions which form collections of men 
and women, in large bodies, for anything except for 
punishment, it would weigh with me, that it is an 
assumption of a false theory of what makes the real 
education and produces the best character. I sup- 
pose that a college is a necessity : that the best 
teacher of the sciences and arts will be found by 
many away from their own abodes ; and that the 
results of any theory on the subject, will come round 
at last practically to the same point. But pardon me 
for reminding you, that I am not speaking for a class. 
The majority of children do not go to college, and 
do not receive the hot-house culture of the popular 
boarding-school. Here comes in the stupid error. 
We think of them as the unhappy ones ; we rank 
them as non-producers of the social virtues. They 
are only the workers, the farmers, the mechanics, the 
nobodies. They are, of course, always behind the 
professionals in all things, especially in religion. 
Your boy, for example, who has been to college and 
graduated from the seminary, comes home, at last, 
the interesting and — heaven save the mark! — the 
learned divine. He steps out of his temporary 



HOME-RELIGION. 



133 



monkhood, in College and Seminary, with the odor 
of traditional sanctity about him. Pause and listen 
if he speaks. He stands before his former compan- 
ions, little less than " Solomon in all his glory," and 
infinitely beyond him in wisdom. The boy who has 
been toiling all the while in the shop or on the farm, 
and whose heart has been mellowed by the constant 
common sunshine of household virtues and trials, 
hides his modest head, for the time. The young 
divine has picked up very little real knowledge of 
life. He has been all the time, as it were, in the 
parlors of people. He has seen only the boarding- 
house side of the times. No one has been so rude as 
to rub him to the quick, and cool down his self-esteem, 
as children do in all well-regulated families. No one 
has been so kind as 6 to take him down 1 at times 
from his highness, and say to him kindly, but in tones 
that are better than the enthymemes of logic : " My 
boy, you are growing up with an inordinate self- 
consciousness. Your comfortable seclusion, your 
studies, your habits of morality, your inoffensiveness, 
the few hard knocks that you receive as you get on, 
all are allowing you to fancy that you are the very 
pink of perfection, a very Caiaphas, without spot or 
reproach. The good that is in you is in danger of 
being overgrown with a scurf of pious self-esteem, 
by the very excellences of your nature." His home 
would have done this for him, in most cases. 

May I confess, in this matter. The last year that 
I was in college, my father became dangerously sick, 



134 TEE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



and I was summoned home, to be ready to take his 
place if he had died. I had been then seven years 
in the monkish cells of boarding-school and college. 
I had become used to it. I despised anything else. 
The change to home, where I was only one of a 
dozen ; with no more rights than the rest, and open 
to the thousand little jars and light arrows of the 
houshold infantry, set me, for a while, half wild. Yet 
it was an average household, I found, in after life, 
when I had exchanged the student's world for the 
real one. Something of the same experience is 
probably felt by all who have passed along the same 
path. And much of the unreality in the disburse- 
ments of young divines, those gentle, pale anemones 
and wind-flowers of an early spring, is due to the 
fact, that after they have piled up the knowledge of 
their profession in their brains, it takes some time to 
put most of it out again, and begin to learn of men 
and women, who are not yet on the roll of the 
canonized saints, and do not affect much the pale 
and leaden-eyed scholars of past days. Books tell 
him of the past. He has then to learn, (and it does 
not always come easy,) that the world moves on always 
and the Church must move with it ; that the last 
observation of the shrewdest divine of his sect, told 
only what was true at the time it was taken, not 
what would be always as necessary. He has to do 
some of the thinking for his own time. 

Most of us, too, can give a sad story of the wrecks 
of the new-life which happen in school days. I 



HOME-RELIGION, 



135 



cannot say much ; but there are things which could 
be said, which would abundantly establish the 
argument, that home is a sacred institution, not to be 
lightly surrendered. Dark clouds hang on this 
horizon. The virtue which needed and would have 
adorned home-circles, how often has it proved too 
weak for fhe hot air of the school-room, where the 
bone of the study has been the writings of the 
pagans; where a precocious knowledge has paved 
the way to temptation. You parents complain of the 
temptations of the real world. I tell you, that the 
world of old was infinitely worse. The boy who has 
been the companion of the best and gentlest influ- 
ences, suddenly finds himself at school, in a boarding, 
house with others ; say twenty of them good boys, 
and two bad ones. The old moan of ' one sinner 
destroying much good/ is kept up from all our 
boarding-school life. His home affections are kept 
in abeyance. He is one of a school list. He is only 
an average. If he is regular and convenient in his 
habits, if he has his tasks in order, and does nothing 
to give trouble, the parental care, which such places 
promise, and seldom fulfil, is satisfied. He longs for 
sympathy. He had it at home, and did not know 
that he needed it He is open to good influences, 
no doubt, but he is also open to bad. The father's 
eye at his home kept a look out for this, and jealous 
care of the mother anticipated the dangers before 
him. No one else can do this for him. Certainly 
no one else will I know enough of the rules of 



136 TEE GEURCE OF TEE EOUSEEOLD. 



human nature, in all collections of people. It is the 
same. Now and then the saint arises to take care to 
always love and think for the weak, and to delight in 
loving the disagreeable and inconvenient. But it is 
rare. The rule is the other way. Many a restless 
boy, whose fault lies in an inward steam, that no 
amount of repressing can break to parlor quietudes, 
has been driven to accept the decree of the careless 
tutors and governors about him, that he was bad, 
when he was not bad at all. He was inconvenient. 
He was too healthy ; made red blood too fast, to 
keep quiet in anything less than a twenty-acre lot. 
He finds in his new abode, that he is best out of the 
way of his elders. They endure him, by a plentiful 
use of the tonic of ' don't/ He soon assumes a 
character, which is apt to remain with him for life. 
The trouble is that he had no call to do this, save in 
his father's home, and with the experience of the 
elder to help him. But if your boy is alone, you 
must not complain of him if he learns to stand on 
his own feet, among boys. He cannot depend on 
you. The vital questions of life, you are not near to 
answer. He is precocious, by necessity. He is ' up 
to a thing or two,' as much as any man of thirty. 
He is acquainted with the ways of the multitude. 
He is keen, or thinks that he is. He cuts his eye 
teeth, after the first year at school. He then begins 
to sow his wild oats, before he has conquered his 
love of candy. 

Now I am misanthropical enough to believe that 



HOME-RELIGION. 



137 



this set of faults are the characteristics of the commu- 
nity ; that they have poisoned our very ideas of God 
and His religion. Assembly virtues, ecclesiastical 
graces, talk- qualities, pious exhortations, eloquent 
remarks in form of prayers have taken the place of 
the real solid things of character. The Boston 
hypocrite and defaulter the other day had only the 
excess of the qualities which show a stain in the 
social rivulets on every side of us. Our boy, in the 
school, has the temptations of which I have spoken, 
and then added to it all the classical studies, which 
certainly inform the mind of much of human 
depravity, whatever they do for the heart. He 
follows Eneas to Carthage, and smacks the ' Bowery' 
wit of Horace, and learns the complex idioms of 
language, and many other things. Is it strange, 
that the four years of college are unlike any others 
in a man's life? That the college sense of honor is a 
thing to itself, which no faculty has ever been able 
to sound or guide ? That the dissipations of college 
are destructive and fatal ? And yet, and here is the 
point that I make, we so unite to exaggerate the 
superiority of mental cultivation over moral purity : 
of mind over character, that we are compelled to 
tolerate life-long evils in all the ramifications of 
society. I am not disposed to condemn schools or 
colleges, or to run a tilt at the prerogatives or class 
privileges of professional men. But I lament the 
failing power of the sturdy independence of the 
tmlearned body of society. In the old world, the 



133 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



titled aristocracy is a fixed barrier to the assumptions 
of the learned classes. It is a good thing. Only 
there is a better. There are always a large and 
influential body of men, in England, whose interests 
are on the side of the work-day world. They are 
exempt from the necessity of making a fortune, 
They accept education as a subordinate thing, not 
the first or the highest thing. They inherit the 
instinct to defend the virtues of home. They believe 
in honor as a safeguard to their inherited advantages, 
and frown down the guerillas, the talkers, the lectu- 
rers and reformers, who, under specious pretexts, are 
making war on things settled and approved, under 
the pretences of a superior knowledge. I have 
amused myself, lately, in this connection, in asking 
men of common virtues, "Which do you esteem most, 
mind or character ?" The first answer is certain to 
be confused. The tone of our ordinary habit, is to 
answer for mind. It is the second thought, which 
suggests the true reply. The talker is conscious of 
his rank in American society, before the doer. As 
a professional man myself, of course I do not sigh 
for the good old days of Queen Bess, when the 
clergyman was allowed to take his seat below the 
salt, and on getting a parish, to aspire to the hand 
of the maid servant, if he wished to marry. But I 
doubt if there were not some rare advantages in 
that state of things for the masses. Between the 
supremacy of mind and of heart, I cannot for a 
moment hesitate in the preference. Out of the heart 



HOME-RELIGION. 



139 



are still the issues of life. Intellect, I do not say 
unsanctified, but only unmodified by influences 
from the working- world of real men, is simply an 
abuse ; all the worse for being a holy abuse. The 
aristocracy of mind is as fatal as that of wealth. The 
clergy are a poor substitute for the nobility of the 
landed proprietors, in the regeneration of social 
morals. Their conventual education, so far as it 
prevails over their home education, is an evil which 
the great object of their preaching is hardly able to 
overcome. The weakness of human nature will 
impair the sublimity of their one theme of thought. 
They were never intended by the commission of 
Christ to accomplish this end. They do it most 
imperfectly. They are men only. Their manhood 
is defective in some of its chief characters, by the 
very seclusion of their early life. They, like the 
prophets, can denounce the evils of corruption in the 
common walks of life, but a society ruled or largely 
moulded by them alone, will be in the rear of the 
progress of the world. It has always been so. It is 
so now. 

There is too much of unreality in the workings of 
our Church systems. We are perpetuating the 
obsolete maxims of the ages of history. The reforms 
of evils, the actual abolition of existing wrongs, are 
too much left to the outside world. The preacher 
has too often degenerated into the finished scholar 
and the subtle rhetorician. We are too often re- 
minded by them of the orator Tcrtnlhis, whose 



140 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



eloquence won his fee, at the expense of the truth. 
It is easy to see that the pulpit is becoming weak to 
assert itself, in the great reforms of the day. Men 
are becoming Quakers in a practical way. They 
instinctively look to the reformer who speaks from 
the workman's bench, and points his argument with 
something of skeptical unbelief. 

In conclusion, let me compare the three modes of 
thought of the Church, which will explain my 
position. 

I. There is the dogma of a sacerdotal class. This 
is medieval, and its representative is the Roman 
Church. In this theory, the Church is the clergy. 
They are the sovereigns of the race. In their hands 
are deposited the great sacraments of salvation. 
They only can make friends with the Creator. They 
stand between men and God. They hold the keys 
which unlock the gates of the kingdom of heaven. 
In this theory the element of piety is faith in them 
and in their ways of work. For evident reasons they 
are celibates. They are a body in close corporation, 
which looks to its own vitality alone, for the preser- 
vation of the kingdom of God. Religion is stamped 
with their impress. No shekel can pass current, 
until it is impressed by them with the seal of the 
sanctuary. There is too much of this effete tendency 
in our own Church. Men call it Romanism, and its 
advocates repudiate the charge, on the ground of 
their rejection of the claims of the pope. But it is 
the old fable over again, of the fox who was invited 



E0ME-BEL1G10N. 



141 



to enter the lion's den. The steps all point one way. 
Nulla vestigia retrorsa. They may not wish to see 
any one of the old errors of the Roman Church 
reproduced in precise form. What they do aim at 
is the continuation of a caste of priests, and the 
powers of a professional proprietary. 

II. With others the Church is the company of 
believers in dogmas. Men are selected by and as 
individuals. Piety is the intellectual process of 
grown men, who first think out for themselves all the 
processes of the faith of certain doctrines, and then 
league together for certain purposes. In this society, 
or these Protestant societies, the supremacy of intel- 
lect is the one antidote for all the temptations of the 
world, the flesh and the devil. Religion is addressed 
to each man alone. It all lies between him and his 
Creator. This is the Congregational form of religious 
society. It has been tried for three hundred years, 
and I mean no injury to any good brother, if I say, 
that I think it is being tried in the balances and 
found wanting. It is supple to adapt itself to the 
changes of society, but its proud boast of facility to 
do so is its ruin. It loses credit, for want of some 
determining principle in times of trial. It is a net 
which can hold the small fish, but it fails at the strain 
with the strong ones. The Unitarians formerly 
demonstrated, and others are demonstrating that it 
is a rope of sand. The individuals come together 
and they do not cohere. There is a radical defect in 



H2 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



its views of life. It loses year by year the sympathy 
of earnest men. 

III. The true theory of the Church is, in my 
judgment, the Church which can take men into its 
fold, as members of homes; that Church, which is 
not the preserve of any one privileged class ; not the 
aggregate of a series of adult professors, who agree 
to be bound by compact, but a collection of homes, 
in which the supremacy of home is the groundwork 
of everything that is recognized in its doctrines. It 
begins with the beginning of life, and as far as it 
asserts the original sin of man, coordinates with it 
the mercy of Christ It makes the first authority to 
be that of the parent, and promotes it with the 
supplement of the friends of the family. It conse- 
crates all the life from eight days old and under, by 
the doctrines of its font of salvation. It creates no 
claim to honor, save in character as the highest 
consideration. Is a man twenty times a professor of 
all the pieties. It asks : What are his works? Has 
he been baptized by the whole House of Bishops ? 
What is his character ? Has he been converted by 
astounding proofs on the very road to Damascus ? 
What does it do for him, at his desk, in the market, 
in his household ? It may be asked sneeringly, do I 
pretend that the Episcopal Church answers this 
description ? I reply, If you look at her formulas of 
ecclesiastical working, she at least aims at it. She 
does call on her children, from one end of the Prayer- 
book to the other, as members of households, 



HOME-RELIGION. 



143 



consecrated by her prayers and bound to her by the 
catechism and the liturgy, in that original relation. 
This is your Church, by the act, first of all, of your 
parents. It is dear to you because it holds every 
one of your children just as strongly as it holds you. 
Like a good ship, it takes into it, for the voyage 
across the ocean of this life, old men and maidens, 
young men and children alike. It takes in a given 
community as a collection of homes, rather than as 
individuals, and keeps before all alike the terms of 
the contract, as contingent on character, not on 
privilege. It repudiates the class-idea of any lords 
over God's heritage, be that claim either the 
unspoken sanctity of the monk, or the eloquent 
sanctity of the dogmatic preacher. The virtues of 
the family are the virtues of the Church. The piety 
of the catechism is the piety of 'duty to God and 
duty to man.' May the Father who is known as 
ours, in proportion as we realize that manner of love, 
grant us grace to perceive and value this blessing ; 
and make our Church system a reality and a praise 
in the land, for His glory and our salvation. Thus 
then, I claim that the text is as true to the Christian 
as ever it was to the Israelite : he too, is to learn the 
virtues of life and the graces of piety, by guarding 
the privacy of his own home. He is allowed to love 
his neighbor as himself, by first learning to make 
himself worth loving, and by loving his wife and 
children better. He is to be a good Churchman, by 
being first a good man, a good father and husband. 



144 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



After the strictest model of the wisest of men, he 
keeps the fountain of the rivulets in the streets pure, 
that they may refresh other men. He can enter into 
the spirit of the precept—" Let them be thine own, 
and not strangers with thee Let thy fountain be 
blessed; and rejoice with the wife of thy youth: 
the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts 
satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished with 
her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished 
with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a 
stranger ? F or the ways of a man are before the 
eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings." 



IX. 



HUSBANDS AND FATHERS. 



" Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge^ 
giving honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being 
heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hin- 
dered.'' 1 — i Peter iii. 7. 

HE word weaker here is confined to the 
physical weakness of the female sex. It 
has no association with the sneering 
sense, in which it is sometimes used by vul- 
gar persons. Prerogative and reason do not lie in 
muscle. It far oftener reverses the matter. Minerva 
oftener excels in the struggle of brute force with 
Hercules. If he only keeps his hands off, she leaves 
the brawny giant the writhing victim of her arrows. 
It is well to notice this distinction. The apostle St 
Peter is not a man of many soft words. He stands 
before us as a very plain speaker. He it is, that 
makes the appeal to one's manhood, when he bids 
Christian husbands to dwell with their wives, as 
physically stronger ; as it were to warn them, by all 
that makes them Christians, to avoid the rudeness of 
10 




1 46 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



brutes and heathens. He leaves the question of 
relative intellect and of relative right in their different 
stations, as they arise, where it ought to be left, to 
the decisions of love and a sound mind. The text 
is perverted when it is used in any other sense. It 
is simply absurd to debate by it the popular question 
of the age, as to the superiority of one sex over the 
other. The intellect of the wife may far outstrip the 
dull and sordid motions of the husband. It often 
does. The woman who is compelled to acknowledge 
the fact that her lord is a fool or a brute, in my way 
of looking at it, instead of crying out for our sympa- 
thy, ought to go into the gloomiest wood, where the 
damp chills of the malarious fogs make a home 
for toads and newts, and at midnight ask of the witch 
Hecate, how it came to pass — how she was such a 
fool, as to link herself to a Caliban * whether it was 
money or worse that bought her. The absurdities 
and perversions of a few silly women of both sexes, 
have provoked in the public mind too much sensitive- 
ness as to this question. The man is the head of 
the woman. He was before the Church was ever 
heard of. He will be, if the knowledge of the Bible 
should ever be forgotten, or be universally established. 
He has the right of physical force ; and as long as 
he is imperfect, he will abuse it. He has the rights 
of immunity from her needs and pains ; he has not 
her yearnings for sympathy ; his cuticle is tougher. 
He has not her tendency to self-sacrifice, her 
passionateness and mobility ; and until he is so near 



HUSBANDS AND FAT REUS, 



*47 



a saint, as to act always by reason, and the exact 
rules of unselfish justice to all beings, he will 
unquestionably be often what they call a tyrant. 
As long as she is not a saint, acting by the sublimi- 
ties of an infallible passion for the eternal beauty 
and the absolute goodness, she will be the fit com- 
panion for him. Her emancipation will be declared, 
when the two are fully pervaded and sanctified by 
the spirit of Christ, as St. Paul indicated, when in 
one of those inspired arguments, that touch the heart 
of a thing, he involved the whole subject in a few 
precepts, which all can see; which here and there 
some do see. I honor the old rugged St. Peter. 
He was a hard-headed old man ; but there was the 
generosity of a noble soul in him. In both the 
instances in which he alludes to this subject, he 
shows the same feeling of manly tenderness for the 
weakness of woman. And though this question is 
not the one that I wish to speak on now, it seems 
impossible to go on till I have put out of the way, 
or allayed in some degree this sensitiveness. I 
therefore quote in this connection passages from two 
writers, a man and a woman, both of repute. 
Jeremy Taylor, in his famous sermon of The Marriage 
Ring, in speaking of the obligation of a wife to pro- 
portion out her duty to her husband, says : "The first 
duty is obedience ; which, because it is nowhere 
enjoined that the man should exact of her, but often 
commanded her to pay, gives demonstration that 
it is a voluntary cession that is required ; such a 



148 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



cession as must be without coercion and violence on 
his part, but on fair inducements and reasonableness 
in the thing, and out of love and honor on her part." 
There is great force in the fact here mentioned, that 
the husband is nowhere commanded to enforce 
obedience. While it allows him his rights, it breaks 
the rod that he had been holding before as a heathen 
man. Again he says, " It seems to be with husbands 
as it is with bishops and priests, to whom much honor 
is due ; but yet so that if they stand on it, and chal- 
lenge it, they become less honorable : and as 
amongst men and women humility is the way to be 
preferred ; so is it in husbands, they shall prevail by 
cession, by sweetness and counsel, and charity and 
compliance." " Indeed there is scarce any matter 
of duty, but it concerns both alike, and is only dis- 
tinguished by names, and hath its variety by 
circumstances and little accidents : and what in one 
is called 'love/ in the other is called 1 reverence;' 
and what in the wife is 'obedience/ the same in the 
man is 'duty/ He provides, and she dispenses; 
he gives commandments, and she rules by them ; he 
rules her by authority, and she rules him by love ; 
she ought by all means to please him, and he must 
by no means displease her. For as the heart is set 
in the midst of the body, though it strikes to one 
side by the prerogative of nature, yet those throbs 
and constant motions are felt on the other side also, 
and the influence is equal to both ; so is it in con- 
jugal duties: some motions are to the one side more 



HUSBANDS AND FA TEEMS. 



149 



than to the other, but the interest is on both, and 
the duty is equal in the several instances." 

The other quotation is from the pen of a living 
woman : probably as well acquainted as any one, 
with the general sentiment of her sex. She repre- 
sents a good man, who had been called on to give up 
something which he earnestly desired, as saying, in 
explanation of his action : " I would not have been 
worthy of that relation if I had not felt in my heart 
the true love of a husband as set forth in the New 
Testament ; — ' who should love his wife even as 
Christ loved the Church and gave himself for it 
and in case any peril or danger threatened this dear 
soul, and I could not give myself for her, I had never 
been worthy the honor she has done me. For, I 
take it, wherever there is a true cross or burden to be 
borne by one or the other, that the man who is made 
in the image of God, as to strength and endurance, 
should take it upon himself and not lay it upon her 
that is weaker : for he is therefore strong, not that he 
may tyrannize over the weak, but bear their burdens 
for them, even as Christ for his Church.* 

It seems to me, that a calm consideration of these 
two statements, may allay any sensitiveness on the 
subject of the proper place and duty of the man in 
the household. He is the natural head of it. It is 
his home. He is the originator of it. If he is a true 
man he will be the head of it by merit : if a bad one, 



* See " The Minister's Wooing. " 



1 S° THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



by force. The very suggestion of rebellion and re- 
served rights of secession in the States of this union, 
has done more to destroy the chivalry of the male sex 
in this country, than all the male vices put together. 
There is an instinct in regard to this, which you may 
call brute instinct, if you will, but it is there, which 
rouses the best and the worst in men, to extirpate 
rebellion, when it offers to strike at the world-old 
regimen of the family. Your ferry boat, my fair 
friends, may be in a fog of theories, but it is not the 
way out of the fog to tear it to pieces and trust to 
the separate planks of it. There are evils which we 
may all contend against, but it is the saddest of all 
reforms which can hope for good in unbelief of the 
revelation of God, to which women owe, to- day, 
their advancement 

With these preliminaries, I advance the opinion, 
that the original idea of a fully developed man is one 
in the circle of a home. I am not bound, by the way 
I put it, to compare married and single life. I only 
look at man as he stands in the great family of nature. 
He is put there in three relations, as son, as husband, 
and as father. I am to speak of his duties in these 
relations. I leave the first condition to some other 
evening. It is natural to begin where the scripture 
began with these relations ; that is with the husband. 
We find him first in Eden, as the one whom in pity 
God took care should not be alone. Novels and all 
manner of romances and poetry in this age leave the 
sexes at the gate of Eden, at the beginning of mar- 



HUSBANDS AND FATHERS. I$i 

ried life, as if it were the end-all of real life. It is 
the beginning of real heart-life. Your Eden is possi- 
ble, as duty is then begun, on a higher scale. Of 
course there are duties and heart-life before. No 
one doubts it. But there is one fact, which no one 
will mistake. A man is then put under bonds to 
society. A boy can leave his Father's home and 
wander to the end of the world, and violate no fixed 
law of society. His sense of duty is limited by the 
sense of partial irresponsibility to any fixed time and 
place. 

As a young man, my chiefest pleasure was sail- 
ing in the wildest winds ; and never with a sensa- 
tion of fear. I find now, that I carry a wife and 
children with me into a boat, and the pleasure is all 
gone if the wind is high. So I fancy most young 
men now, perhaps always, have this Arab sensation 
of restlessness and independence, by nature. If they 
are dutiful in society, it is with the conviction, that 
at any time they can fold up their tents and steal 
away, at a moment's notice. If others depend on 
them, they can send them money. If society claims 
them, they can either disregard it, or can satisfy 
themselves with promises to return on call. If home 
becomes unpleasant, like Jacob, they can go forth 
alone, and find some land of Ur, where the sheep of 
Laban are needing their care, and possibly some 
Rachel waiting to reward their fidelity. But there 
is every difference between Jacob crossing the brook 
Jabbok, alone, with his staff in his hand and nothinj 



152 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



else, and the same man returning to the stream, with 
these two bands, and Esau coming to meet' him. 
In the one case he was young, lithe, mobile, inexperi- 
enced, and as cunning and apt at concealment as a 
young leopard. Esau might have come against him 
alone, with ten thousand men, and been laughed at 
for his pains. In the other his courage departed 
from him. His heart had ruij out into so many 
channels ; was seen to be divided up between so 
many weak women and helpless children, and so 
many flocks and herds to keep- them alive, that he 
had nothing to do but to hide, and cry to the Lord 
to help him. I am afraid that no man can pray to 
God for his help, with all-prevailing force, until he 
has somebody depending on him. This world is so 
arranged in mercy that a young man can be imagined 
who never fears danger. He has a glorious scorn 
of it. He wont believe in it. He is constantly 
filling up the picture of the wise man that ' the fool 
is led like an ox to the slaughter/ because he will 
not accept his experience at second-hand. He is 
teres and rotimdits ; he is bound to roll right, some- 
how. If he dies by some accident, well, who is left 
to weep for him ? He is gone, and that is the end 
of it. So he enjoys life while it lasts, and who is 
the worse ? I am of opinion that the argument 
which has been pointed at the Church of Rome, 
because of her celibate priests, is a good one ; that 
they can never be the safe guides of society, because 
they lack the ties of home-life, and are so defective 



HUSBANDS AND FATHERS. 



153 



in that regard as to be always ready for rebellion 
against the state. 

Now, religion is the sum of experience. I mean 
the solid experience of the whole man; all his 
faculties, his reason, his heart, his associations. The 
man who has only himself to think of, has need of 
something else to stir him to any very deep thought 
or feeling. He is apt to find himself like a stranger 
travelling in a country which is at war. He takes 
good care to keep out of the way of the enemy's 
bullets, and holds him ready to flee at an hour's 
notice. He has no bonds to keep him in one place, 
in such a land, and he can have only a dim idea of 
the sterner duties of the citizens who cannot and will 
not desert the land of their nativity. They do escape 
many evils of too much sympathy ; and with it they 
lose some of the advantages of real life. The world 
has tried the selfish life over and over again, and 
declared it wanting. The religion of Christ has 
failed to impress a man, if it does not teach him that 
the real life is one of action for the good of the whole, 
of self-denial in assuming the wants of the weaker, 
of self-forgetfulness and disregard of personal ease, 
that the purposes of God may be worked out in 
others. Of course, I am not making out that the 
graces of religion require me to prove that marriage 
is a sacrament, necessary to salvation. That subject 
I mean to treat alone, when I speak of the unmarried. 
I simply make this point : while the literature of the 
age which is most read, gives to the subject the 



154 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



golden hue of Eden, and the young come together, 
in this relation, with their minds set on the worldly 
pleasures and advantages of it; the nobler thought, 
which is forgotten, is, that it is the beginning of 
the life of duty, in mutual work. If there were no 
pleasures in it, the other thought alone ought to 
make it the shrine of the most heroic ambition. 
There are such marriages and such homes. The 
infidel age can see no way out of them ; no profound 
duty in them. The fond faith in the fact of self- 
pleasing, is so indoctrinated in us all, that we imagine 
that the Son of God came down from heaven to die, 
that we might see how God loves us and wishes us 
to have a good time, and indulge our contemptible 
selfishness to the utmost. Have we no faith in any- 
thing better than our own pleasure ? If not, God 
help us, for nature has no place for us. Fortunately, 
in these realities of daily life, the teaching • goes on 
ever, whether we take it easy or hard. Would that 
our sense of duty to God were more in harmony with 
the necessity of a faith in the duties of home-life. 
They are too much disconnected, and both religion 
and home suffer. The relation is the issuance of a 
new law to both, from the time of its beginning 
onwards ; and it is a law in two tables. 

The first table is, that the true dictate of the 
noblest part of man, is to love some one better than 
himself. I do not now speak of the heroic, but of 
the ordinary. 

The second table is made up of duties assumed to 



HUSBANDS AND FATHERS. 



155 



infants and young children, by which a man becomes 
like his Maker. He is a second providence — and 
prepares to give himself, to die and get out of the 
way, for others. And in both tables the sublime of 
love is the fulfilling of the Law. The first thing that 
is taught and learned, by both parents, is the 
development of personal happiness, in the sense of 
making another's interests the first consideration. 
We call this love, par excellence. The poets rave 
about it. The thrilling themes of literature are 
based on it. Shall the religion of Christ have no 
recognition of it ? It seems to me, that the apostle 
has shown his appreciation of it, when he reasons of 
the love which God has revealed in Christ, as need- 
ing this similitude to make it comprehended by us. 
He teaches the duty of men to their wives, by the 
similitude of Christ and the Church. Then he turns 
it round and reveals the love of God to us, by the 
love of this one relation. Now I am aiming at the 
thought, that there is a similarity in the two sorts of 
love, which can help both the Church and the home 
of a man, if he will study it. If a man believes that 
it makes him a better Christian, to be what he feels 
he ought to be towards his wife and children, that as 
he learns the catechism of duty to them, he is rising 
in the esteem of the Church, he has a higher 
motive to be a true man in both places. If he has 
some narrow conceit about faith and works, which 
leads him to be indifferent to his home-duties, and to 
indulge in the dreams of a religion which condones 



156 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



his selfishness and disregard of the gentler affections 
of his family, then he is out of joint with home and 
Church both. The first table of the home law, then, 
is the fact of a love for another, that can begin the 
cure of selfishness ; can give one that satisfaction, at 
the self-denials of every day, which creates and 
rewards faith and gilds the toils of life. Here is a 
man, who toils from Monday to Saturday, year in 
and year out For three hundred days every year 
he makes and sells ; he goes over the ferry in snow 
and sleet ; he occupies a dull back office, and indulges 
his eye with the bricks of his neighbor's store ; and 
for what ? Does he like it ? He does not complain. 
He has rewards in it, as he goes on. It may seem 
to him hard at times. He is sometimes cast down 
at the drag and the monotony, the fears and the 
anxieties of it. The harness galls him sometimes, 
but he has glided into it by a faith which he got 
somehow. He grew up out of the careless, rollick- 
ing, and selfish boy, and set his face to the grind- 
stone, and hardly ever stopped to analyze the pro- 
cess. He called it sowing his wild oats. Nature 
teaches us so gently, that we are not always turning 
the page to mark the advances that we make. But 
he learned first from a woman, and there were various 
passing illusions, it may be, which mingled in with 
the truth that the noblest life is found in working for 
others. He saw an example set him, and with more 
or less fidelity carried out, that to love another better 
than onesself is the secret of happiness in this world. 



HUSBANDS AND FATHERS. 



157 



Before he had weighed it in all its bearings, he had 
become converted to the principle. If I may put his 
faith into the words of a poet, it is this : 

" To make a happy fireside clime 

For weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

He toils on now, the steady worker, the sober and 
sedate citizen, and his earnings go to help others. 
When he is dead, he hopes to leave his memory in 
the hearts of his children. That man lives by faith. 
It is a pity that he does not always know it, and 
raise the spirit of his walk and conversation into a 
song of praise to God. To see how much he walks 
by faith, go and convince him that his family are 
unworthy, and behold how his nerve is destroyed. 

I cannot close better than with two pictures, which 
can speak for themselves. The one is from the New 
York Tribune of yesterday, as follows, of life in Paris 
among the laboring people, who are always in the 
majority. It occurs in the letter of a Frenchman in 
Paris : 

" The great problems of politics cannot be solved by talkers who 
have never breathed the air of a workshop. Their solution lies in 
this simple idea, the daily bread of body and soul, through labor and 
through love. But this labor will never become attractive unless the 
family sentiment of the family resumes its power. Grogshops should 
be rigorously shut on Mondays. The laborer begins the week too 
badly to end it well. Since he no longer recognizes the Church nor 
knows anything of the Bible— since he makes it his pride to be bur- 
ied like a dog, his home is nothing but a den from which his daugh- 
ter escapes from terror as soon as she is sixteen years old, and from 



158 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



which his son naturally passes to the prison of La Roqmtte. The 
house is hell, where the husband beats the wife on the days when 
they are not spreeing together. That the education of such a house- 
hold might be complete, the Satanic paper has appeared. The worst 
of criminals is the journalist who takes charge of souls, without any 
call thereto, and who scatters abroad the pestilent crop of lies. He 
always preaches atheism. He takes from those who have nothing 
on earth, the idea of heaven. He commands them to leave hope be- 
hind, here and hereafter. Religion, even if it has nothing to do 
with government, impresses on the heart respect for law. It is the 
dignity of the poor man, the humility of the rich. Out of the Church 
there is no social salvation. What is a woman nowadays to do, 
without bread or work— her children sick in the cradle— her husband 
in the wineshop ? Once she could look to God for help or resignation. 
Now she is all alone. The sentiment of duty accomplished is 
strength and rest to the conscience when one believes in a better life. 
But the common people have sold to atheism their share in 
paradise." 

This, for a French reporter, is pretty fair gospel. 
It is fearful when we think that he is telling of gloomy 
facts, and they have their counterpart in Brooklyn. 
I call to your notice, that he charges the whole 
trouble on the man ; where it ought to lie. 

The other picture is not from a divine, either. It 
is poor Burns' " Cottager." The world has stamped 
on it the marks of truth. The children of a Scotch 
peasant are seen to gather in to the sacred retreat 
of a rustic home. You feel that the place is to them 
the Bethel, the house of God indeed. The air feels 
safe. It is here to be noted again, that the father is 
the centre of the picture. An unmentioned authority 
is made to emanate from him, which nothing else 
could atone for. He 



HUSBANDS AND FATHERS. 159 



" Turns o'er with patriarchal grace, 
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride 

« He wales the psalm " for their praise, as they 
sing the old tunes, to which Burns thought " Italian 
trills, tame." The priest-like father " reads the 
sacred page," and is for the time the visible priest 
and supreme, rightful head of the family. 

"Then kneeling down, to heaven's eternal King, 
The saint, the father and the husband prays 

" Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing, 
That thus they all shall meet in future days : 
There ever bask in uncreated rays. 
No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear, 
Together hymning their Creator's praise, 
In such society, yet still more dear ; 
While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere." 

The poet draws two lessons from this scene, and 
there can be no doubt of either of them. 

" Compared with this, how poor religion's pride," 

if it be without these virtues, or if it despise them. 

" From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs." 

It is the true life of any nation, that its men be as 
true to their duties, to home and God, as the fellow 
countrymen of Burns were in his time. It realizes 
to my mind the scene, which was in the text of St. 
Peter; "Ye husbands, dwell with them according to 
knowledge/' that is, intelligently and honorably, and 
not as the pagans and profane unbelievers; giving 
honor to the wife, as to the physically weaker, and 
in her weakness relying on your strength and 



l6o THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



generosity for protection. Then he introduces 
the thought that binds the two to the altar of 
religion ; and " as being heirs together" not apart ; 
not by a religion that somehow condones the 
offences of neglect at home and pretence abroad; 
but together, that your prayers may not be hindered. 

Brethren, may your prayers ascend from such 
family altars, and help you on the way of this life and 
a better, at one and the same time. 



X. 

HOMES.— THE MOTHER. 

" This is a great mystery : but I speak concerning Christ and the 
Church^— -Eph. v. 32. 




ACRAMENTUM hoc magnum est, says 
the Vulgate, and the Latin Church has 
enrolled the rite as one of the seven 
sacraments. The Reformers raised a vast 



outcry against their false theology, and from that 
time to this, the question has been open to the dis- 
putatious, as the favorite theme of a varied and end- 
less discussion. Our own Church has taken the 
moderate course, and while denying that it is " a 
sacrament of the gospel," but rather a state of life 
allowed in the scriptures, she has declared it honora- 
ble in all men ; and has generally considered the 
authority of the minister of religion and the blessing 
of the Church as most fitting to its beauty and due 
performance. The Church of England has guarded 
the ceremony with the utmost care, and the Episco- 
pal Church in this country has instinctively followed 
II 



l62 



HOMES.— TEE MOTHER. 



her in this jealousy of the purity of the rite. It is 
not my purpose to go into any lengthy argument, to 
show the meaning of St. Paul, in regard to the word 
mystery. It will be simply asserted by me, and 
any one can test the verity of the assertion, that he 
meant, simply : this is a religious truth ; that is, a 
truth of the same kind of faith, as that which holds 
the assertion of Christ and the Church to be a 
mystery. Now, in our common way of speaking, a 
mystery is something that transcends the understand- 
ing ; anciently it was the other way. A mystery 
was something which was in the reach of the faith, 
and which was revealed in order to be received. 
But in this case St. Paul has been running in his own 
mind, the parallel of the married couple on the one 
side and Christ and the Church on the other. He 
appropriately concludes it with the summary asser- 
tion, which belongs to both thoughts: this is a mys- 
tery, this is a religious teaching, i. e., this parallel of 
the marriage of two persons and the union of Christ 
and the soul. This is not saying that either part of 
the parallel is a mystery, much less that marriage is 
a Church sacrament, in any dogmatic sense : but 
that the likeness, which he had in mind, is so. The 
best way to make my statement good is to show 
that he had this similitude in mind. I attempt this, 
saying at the same time that I have never seen it 
done. It may be a dogmatic heresy in me. My 
only hope is, that it may seem to you to be only 
common sense. 



THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 163 



My purpose, to-night, in the course of these re- 
marks on home, is to show the place of woman in 
the home— nothing more. As to her rights or 
even her duties there, I say in advance, I have no 
intention of detailing them. I had rather have the one 
fact, which tells me the relative position of certain 
truths which affect me, than any man's idea of how 
I ought to feel about them. How he feels about it is 
one's own business; it is mine to take what of truth 
St Paul has expressed, and work out of it my own 
law. If I can make the idea in my mind understood 
by you, and then made worthy of your thought, I 
shall be content to leave it to do its own work 
in your minds and lives. In trying to do this, I shall 
in due time have recourse to this passage of St. Paul. 

But I propose just here two thoughts about the 
woman in the home : I. As the wife. Then, II. As 
the mother. It seems stupid to draw attention to the 
violent contrast between her position and that of any 
two friends, of either sex. Yet there have been 
friends who, like David, claimed by a bold flight of 
fancy, that their love passed the love of women. 
There is no sort of congruity in the two conditions. 
You cannot use the same language about them. You 
could in no sense imagine the uses of the language 
that now prevails applied to two friends. You can 
imagine the greatest love and delicacy of mutual help 
and reciprocity, but you can in no just sense or by 
any stretch of imagination attribute to them the same 
love, delicacy, help or reciprocity. But what I wish 



1 64 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



to emphasize, is the fact that though the duties of 
friendship are of the strongest kind, you never would 
confuse the religious element of the one with the 
natural sentiments of the other. You could not 
easily imagine an Apostle, by any train of reasoning, 
at last brought to a point in his argument, when he 
would apparently stop with a sigh of relief, to say, as 
if it stopped all debate, but " This is a great mystery, 
this matter of two friends; but I speak concerning 
Christ and the Church." But why not ? The answer 
is plain. In the one case all the religions of the 
world have accepted the mystery, that is, the reli- 
gious sense of the race in regarding the one. No 
religion of men has ever attempted to elevate the 
other above the line of the ordinary human affections, 
Of friendship, the sweetest things can be said. The 
old Greek and Roman races, bred in camps, adorned 
friendship, and exalted it into the noblest of the 
relations. The old soldier chose his younger com- 
panion, and taught him the art of war, defended him 
in the battle, cheered him on the rough march, and 
took part with him in all his dangers. As with Paul 
and Timothy, he expected the younger to receive 
the last messages of his love and to bun- him after 
he was gone, if it could be so. But where can we 
look for any expression of the mingling the sense of 
the mysteries of religion with this affection ? There 
is nothing of it. 

Let us see the discrepancy a little farther. 
Imagine one reading in the Epistle of St. Paul, 



HOMES.— TEE MOTHER. 



something like this : " Younger friend, submit your- 
self to the older soldier-friend, as unto the Lord. 
For the older is the head of the younger, even as 
Christ is the head of the Church : and He is the 
Saviour of the body of the other. Therefore as the 
Church is subject unto Christ, so let the younger man 
be subject to his particular elder, in every thing." The 
absurdity is evident. But why ? If the infidel rea- 
sonings — allowing for the moment, that they are rea- 
sonings, which reasonings are none — if they have 
any just claim to regard, then the relations of the 
two classes are the same. The woman in her 
marriage relation is held to be only another sort of 
man; she demands equality. She makes an ordi- 
nary contract — she asserts her own will. She 
repudiates the idea of any obedience, and, funnily 
enough to my mind, she rejects with scorn the 
noble precepts of this one apostle, which place her 
on the highest pinnacle of almost religious adoration. 
He exalts her into the next place to the Church of 
the Son of God ; that Bride of the Eternal veiled in 
flesh which is supposed by him to be worthy the 
love of the Almighty, and destined to receive yet 
the triumphal epithalamiums of the purest of angelic 
hosts. 

I claim that this religious idea runs through the 
Bible, and colors all our Christian civilization. I 
could willingly give place here to Bishop Taylor, and 
speak only as he has spoken. On this point he says: 
"Marriage was ordained by God, instituted in paradise, 



1 66 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



was the relief of a natural necessity, and the first bless- 
ing from the Lord ; he gave to man, not a friend, but 
a wife, that is a friend and a wife too ( for a good wo- 
man is in her soul the same that a man is, and she is 
a woman only in her body ; that she may have the 
excellency of the one, and the usefulness of the other, 
and become amiable in both) : it is the seminary of 
the Church, and daily brings forth sons and daughters 
unto God. The first miracle that Jesus ever did, was 
to do honor to a wedding; marriage was in the 
world before sin, and is in all ages of the world the 
greatest and most effective antidote against sin, in 
which all the world had perished, if God had not 
made a remedy." "Here is the proper scene of piety 
and patience, of the duty of parents and the charity 
of relatives ; here kindness is spread abroad, and love 
is united and made firm as a centre ; marriage is the 
nursery of heaven; the virgin sends prayers to God, 
but she carries but one soul to him ; but the state of 
marriage fills up the numbers of the elect, and hath 
in it the labor of love, and the delicacies of friend- 
ship ; the blessing of society, and the union of hands 
and hearts ; it hath in it less of beauty, but more of 
safety than the single life ; it hath more care, but less 
danger ; it is more merry and more sad ; it is fuller of 
sorrows and fuller of joys ; it lies under more burdens, 
and is supported by all the strengths of love and 
charity, and those burdens are deIightful. ,, 

In treating this text, he says: "Single life makes 
men in one sense to be like angels ; but marriage in 



HOMES.— THE MOTHER. 



167 



very many things makes the chaste pair to be like 
to Christ. ' This is a great mystery/ but it is the sym- 
bolical and sacramental representation of the greatest 
mysteries of our religion. Christ descended from his 
Father's bosom, and contracted his divinity with 
flesh and blood, and married our nature, and we be- 
came a Church, the Spouse of the Bridegroom, which 
he cleansed with his blood, and gave her the Holy 
Spirit for a dowry, and heaven for a jointure ; beget- 
ting children unto God by the Gospel. This Spouse 
he has joined to himself, by an excellent charity ; he 
feeds her at his own table, and lodges her nigh his 
own heart; provides for all her necessities, relieves 
her sorrows, determines her doubts, guides her wan- 
derings. He is become her head, and she as a signet 
on his right hand. 

" Here is the eternal conjunction, the indissoluble 
knot, the exceeding love of Christ, the obedience of 
the Spouse, the communicating of goods, the uniting 
of interests, the fruit of marriage, a celestial genera- 
tion, a new creature : Sacramentum hoc magnum est. 
This is the sacramental mystery, represented by the 
holy rite of marriage ; so that marriage is divine in its 
institution, sacred in its union, holy in the mystery, sac- 
ramental in its signification, honorable in its appella- 
tive, religious in its employments : it is advantage to 
the societies of men, and it is ' holiness to the Lord.' 
Dico autem in Christo et ecclesia, it must be in Christ 
and the Church.'' 

Bishop Taylor was a poet as well as a preacher. 



1 68 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



There are some things in religion, (or God help me,) 
that need the combination of the two. There is too 
often a prosaic seeing that sees not; and what is 
more dreary than the common sense of Mr. Grad- 
grind, who adheres strictly to facts, and shipwrecks 
his home on the points of his heartless theories. 
What is sadder than two married people, who have no 
gentle faith in each other? to whom each is only 
as five feet some inches of mere dying clay ? There 
is a union, which helps us to look through the things 
which are seen, to the things which are eternal, in 
that they are supersensual and spiritual ; in which : 

" More divine, 
The light of love shines over all ; 
Of love, that says not mine and thine, 
But ours, for ours is thine and mine." 

It is on this religious ground, that the vagaries of 
the fanatics of the day are seen to shrink up and 
show themselves mean and paltry. It is in this 
faith that woman has a religious work of her own, 
which is not committed to man ; that the institutions 
of life become the " bringing in of a better hope, by 
the which we draw nigh unto God." He gave to 
man the curse of the ground, for his sake, and to 
woman He gave the first promise of the coming 
seed, which should bruise the serpent head of evil. 
For ages this was the only revelation that the race 
of Adam had, and they built on it the modal thoughts 
of the religions which have followed since. 

It behooves women to ponder this fact. The 



HOMES.— THE MOTHER. 



interests of true religion as well as the institutions of 
home demand it of them. What is often thought 
to be progress in new theories of social life, is 
merely forgetfulness of world-old truths, that must 
not be forgotten. If you ask me to give these duties 
of the female sex in detail, I answer, they are seen 
in this chapter. 

I. It is the religious trust of woman, to render 
obedience lovely, by lifting it out of the arena of 
mere mannishness. It is in her heart, to give it a 
divine significance. " As the Church is subject unto 
Christ, so let the woman be to her own husband." 
I defy you to find any social relation of two men, of 
which you could speak in such words. It is the 
divinest idea of obedience in the reach of the imagi- 
nation. It is inconceivable outside of the idea of 
the Church of the Saviour. Aristotle never dreamed 
of it. It had no place in any philosophy of man's 
compounding. It belongs to the religion of the 
crucified ; and it is to it, as the moon is to the sun, a 
reflected light. It is the charge of woman to con- 
tinue and give force to it forever, in the civilization 
of men. 

II. Love, as a religion, is committed to women. 
I think that St. Paul has gone as far as I care to go 
in emphasizing the thought. He certainly has 
thrown himself into the reasoning of this chapter 
with an abandonment, which is total. He has iden- 
tified the love of Christ and the Church, with the 
love of married life, with fearless logic. Let a man 



170 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



love his wife as Christ loves the Church. Try it 
now. Let a man love another; let a son love his 
father; let a scholar love his teacher; let a soldier love 
his captain; let a subject love his king, as Christ 
loves the Church. I do not say, that the wife must 
love her husband as the Church loves Christ ; but if 
she does it better, I shall not fault her. It is not a 
question of degree and comparison. In the logic of 
the heart, there is no room for these niceties. The 
test of the true Christian thought, is, " If ye love me, 
keep my commandments/' Every believer grate- 
fully receives the rule into an unquestioning heart. 
It exalts him, as he can make it real. It is the 
actuality of his faith. He runs to find where he 
can obey, because he knows by sweet experience, 
that every act of obedience is the avenue to new 
blessings. 

It was the thought of St. Paul, that the union of 
the soul of Christians to Christ, and through him to 
God, is as close, in thought, as the union of the soul 
and body in an individual man. And in this con- 
ception I believe that he was inspired. It is a thought 
that takes hold on the deepest mysteries of salvation ; 
it is a maxim in a super-sensual philosophy. There 
was before him a mystical body, fair as the moon, 
clear as the sun, the Bride, the Woman-thought of 
the great drama of the world's history, the Christ- 
mother-thought, the wedding into Divine union of 
this Humanity and the eternal God, and thus raising 
religion out of the region of mere morals and above 



HOMES,— THE MOTHER. 



171 



the question of even personal salvation, and lighten- 
ing the darkness of the future by the dream of espou- 
sals, that shall have in them the cream of all possible 
conceptions of joy, as at the last we shall conceive, 
what is now inconceivable, of the things which God 
hath in store for them that love him. How often 
does St. Paul betray to us that it cheered him under 
all his troubles and persecutions, this thought of per- 
fect union of love and nature with the Lord Jesus. 
Christ was born in him ; and the stormy ocean only 
rocked the cradle of this infant hope. Clouds and 
darkness, wicked men and diabolical dragons trooped 
around him to drive him to dismay ; but Christ was 
in him, breathed with his lungs, stirred his quick 
pulses, touched the strange thinkings of his brain, and 
fear and doubt vanished. He and truth were one. 
Tyrants and devils were only shams. If you will 
only gather into one place, all that he has said on 
this thought, you will see, that if he had one faith, 
that he felt, struggled always for utterance, it was 
this. He and all Christians are identified in the sight 
of God the Father, with the man Christ Jesus. His 
whole ecclesiastical theory, his exhortation to belief, 
and his system of morals, alike turned on this concep- 
tion. If you drop it out of his teaching, you lose St. 
Paul at once. Now, he has expressed it here, " He 
that loveth his wife, loveth himself. For no man 
ever yet hated his own flesh ; but nourisheth it and 
cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church : for we 
are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his 



172 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



bones. For this cause " — note the words — for this 
cause, i. e., to reveal this union of the soul of man to 
God, which is the very foundation-thought of all re- 
ligion — " for this cause shall a man leave his father 
and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and 
they two shall be one flesh." This is a great mystery, 
but it began in Eden. It is put in charge of the re- 
ligion of the world, never to lose this similitude of the 
union of the redeemed to Christ. 

I suppose that God might have made the world 
and continued the generations of men by some other 
rule than the one he has adopted. But in this, under 
which we are living now, I see the union of all things 
in the faith of the Church of Christ. I see that in a 
deep sense, the first Church is the home, and the 
women, like the vestals of old, are set to guard its 
fires, that if men lose out of mind the knowledge of 
the love of God in Christ, they may be won again by 
the chaste conversation of the wife, coupled with rev- 
erent fear of her high mission. 

II. I am to speak of her as the mother. The region 
of sentiment, I would gladly leave, in trying seriously 
to express myself on this tender theme ; but what I 
mean to say in sober earnest will possibly take on 
something of the hue of moonlight. But, is not moon- 
light itself a fact ? Did not God make the moon to 
rule, by her reflected light, when that is the best that 
one may have ? I rather take pride in the fact, that 
it is the sign of the hardest and most shameful char- 
acter that a man can give, when he fails to feel soft- 



HOMES.— THE MOTHER. 



173 



ened at the name of his mother. She stands nearer 
to his secret tenderness for the divine, than even his 
father. His father reasoned with him. But reason 
is the guide of time. It steers the bark now ; and 
Solomon, in a nice distinction of a proverb, speaks of 
the instruction of the father ; that which one may rea- 
son about, and weigh in the balances and scrutinize, 
and modify, by his own experience. 

We value the instruction of the schoolmaster. It 
is the best that we can start with. We take it into 
docile minds. We mean to be guided by it until we 
know better. Most of it we shall always hold and 
profit by; but we shall profit by it because we 
analyze it and intelligently accept it, first by faith 
in him, then by experience of it. But he contrasts 
with it, and not by accident, the law of the mother. 
The wisdom of morals is almost always personified in 
the Bible, as feminine. The divine ideal of the truth 
is always so. The Church, or ideal of man's salvation, 
is female. And all for two reasons, among others : 
I. Because the instincts mingle in it and refuse to 
debate its laws. II. JBecause it woos and wins the 
heart, rather than rests in the cold, cobwebby garret 
of the understanding. 

Into a home of two young people, comes a 

"Little angel unaware, 
With face as round as is the moon." 

In due time, we will say, the mother begins the 
duties of a college faculty for the child. She studies 



174 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the ancient and modern philosophies; she balances 
the pantheist against the deist : she tries the vortices 
of one metaphysician and corrects them with the 
dubito, ergo sum of another, and at last she is able 
to impress on this young student the proposition, 
there is a God. Having stored his mind with the 
solid ideas of the school, she proceeds to deduce from 
it the morals of life : the duty to God and the duty 
to neighbors, asking nothing from faith : deducing 
all duties by logic alone. Is it so? Would you 
have it so ? What then would become of all the 
things that no tongue ever can tell of, and no words 
contain, and yet they are the very blood of the heart 
and are in the fibre of the muscles of all noble 
character. No! first comes the law of the mother. 
The first altar at which a good man kneels is his 
mother's knee. Her hand on his brow is "the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land." The love 
seen in her eyes, is the first revelation to him of the 
angels. Yea, it is the revelation of God— for God at 
last is known to us, as Love. It* reveals to us 
Christ, in its self-forgetfulness and self-denials. 

* " There is hardly any one but has known some household in which, 
year after year, selfishness, and worldliness, and want of family 
affection, have been apparent enough ; and yet instead of the moral 
shipwreck, which might have been expected, and the final moral ruin 
of the various members, the original bond of union has held together; 
there has plainly been some counteracting, redeeming power at work! 
And when we look to see what is that redeeming power, ever at 
work for those who know and care nothing about it, we always find 
that there is some member of that family— oftenest the wife or 
mother— who is silently bearing all things, believing all things, 



HOMES.— TEE MOTHER. 



i/5 



Hear how Solomon puts it. " My son, keep thy 
father's commandment and forsake not the law of 
thy mother : bind them continually upon thine heart, 
tie them about thy neck. When thou goest, it shall 
lead thee ; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee ; 
and when thou awakest it shall talk with thee. For 
the commandment is a lamp " — please mark that ; a 
lamp — but where is the flame of it ? And the law — 
of the mother — is the light; and the reproofs of 
instruction are the way of life : to keep thee (from 
what? From metaphysical distinctions and skepti- 
cisms ? No. But) " from the evil woman, from the 
flattery of a strange tongue." Instruction is to law 
as the moulded candle formed and shaped by art 
and man's device, is to the light, which comes only 
from God. The one is reason ; the other is life. 
The one we can mark with signs and ornament at 
will, the other is purest as it comes from the heart 
of love. So, as the Church tells us of her absent 
Lord, and realizes to us His virtues, and kindles our 
faith in all that is divine, the mother folds the little 
hands, and communicates the first creed, catholic 

hoping all things for them, but for her or himself expecting little or 
nothing in this world, but the rest of the grave. Such a one is really 
bearing the sins of that household : it is no forensic phrase trans- 
ferred by way of illustration from the practice of the law courts : but 
a fact, a vital formation, actually taking place, here, under our very 
eyes. He who has seen and understood this fact, in any one of its 
common daily shapes, needs no commentary on the realization of 
the Man of Sorrows, alike in the suffering Prophet or People of the 
Captivity, and in the Divine Sufferer £>n Calvary." — Sir E. Stuckey, 
quoted by Dean Stanley. 



176 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



and apostolic, which begins with "our Father." 
Her lessons are as the "dew of Hermon that falls on 
the little hill of Zion ; for there the Lord commanded 
the blessing, even life for evermore." 

1 can do no be «er than conclude with the picture 
of a good wife and mother, as the English Church 
cherished her two hundred years ago. "In passing 
through which line of providence," says Bishop Tay! 
lor, of a good woman, « she had the art to secure her 
eternal interest, by turning her condition into duty 
and expressing her duty in the greatest eminency of 
a virtuous, prudent, and rare affection, that hath 
been known in any example. Her husband was 
under God, the light of her eyes, and the cordial of 
her spirits, and the guide of her actions, and the 
measure of her affections, till her affections swelled 
up into a religion, and then it could go no higher, 
but was confederate with those other duties which 
made her dear to God : which rare combination of 
duty and religion I choose to express in the words 
of Solomon : « she forsook not the guide of her youth, 
nor brake the covenant of her God.' 

" As she was a rare wife, so she was an excellent 
mother: for in so tender a constitution of spirit as 
hers was, and in so great kindness towards her 
children, there hath seldom been seen a stricter and 
more curious care of their persons, their deport- 
ment, their learning, and their customs; and if ever 
kindness and care did contest and make parties in 
her, yet her care and her severity were ever 



BOMBS.— THE MOTHER. 



177 



victorious ; and she knew not how to do an ill turn 
to their severer part, by her more tender and for- 
ward kindness. And as her custom was, she turned 
this also into love to her Lord: for she was not 
only diligent to have them bred nobly and re- 
ligiously, but also was careful and solicitous that 
they should be taught to observe all the circum- 
stances and inclinations, the desires and wishes of 
their father; as thinking that virtue to have no 
good circumstances, which was not dressed by his 
copy, and ruled by his lines and affections: and her 
prudence in managing her children was so singular 
and rare, that whenever you mean to bless this 
family, and pray a hearty and a profitable prayer 
for it, beg of God that the children may have those 
excellent things which she designed to them, and 
provided for them in her heart and wishes ; that they 
may live by her purposes, and may grow thither, 
whither she would fain have brought them. All 
these were parts of an excellent religion, as they 
concerned her greatest temporal relations. ,, 

There are proud monuments in the cathedrals and 
old abbeys of England, but none rarer than this which 
consecrates the name of the Lady Frances, Countess 
of Carberry. If the picture seems to you old- 
fashioned ; God help us to value the religion, which 
taught men to admire and cherish such wives and 
matrons. It is the religion of home and of nature. 
It is the religion to which we must return, if we 
would have the blessing of God. 
12 



XL 



SONS AT HOME. 

s( That our sons may he as plants grown up in their youth."— Ps alm 
cxliv. 12. 

ING DAVID is here praying in the 
measures of a song of public praise, to the 
Lord, to deliver his nation from the 
power of enemies, so that the great ends of na- 
tional life might be answered in a reign of peace. 
He was a man of war. But there was something in 
him better than that. He was a thinker. He looked 
behind the appearances of to-day, and was worthy 
of his title of the man after God's own heart — inas- 
much as he too, had some vague notion of the great 
duty of kings and judges, in seeking to advance the 
good of the weaker members of society, and not 
their own pleasures. He now prays for a peaceful 
reign. " Rid me, and deliver me from the hand of 
strange children." These strange children are the 
people of the Gentile stock, who served other gods; 
and in the different methods of education which 




SONS AT HOME. 



179 



resulted from the difference of their ideas and man- 
ners, were to be dreaded by him, for their evil 
influences on the younger members of his kingdom. 
They were strange children ; they would innoculate 
his children with strangeness. They had a mouth 
" speaking vanity." They would injure his young 
people with their own pagan follies, until they would 
lose the finer sense of the true servants of the cove- 
nant of their fathers' God. Their " right hand was 
a right hand of falsehood :" in other words, there 
was the common infidelity to vows and covenant 
pledges which marked the infidel nations of the 
ancient world. They would corrupt the simplicity 
of the pious youth of the Jewish faith, and turn them 
aside from the stricter fidelity of the law of Moses. 
The idea of the passage then is seen to be, the care 
of the elder and the kingly father for the peace of 
the realm, because of the good which it would do to 
the young, and to the material interests of his king- 
dom. It is in this connection, then, that the text 
occurs, "Give us peace and freedom from the 
presence of the heathen; that our sons may be as 
plants grown up in their youth ; that our daughters 
may be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude 
of a palace : that our garners may be full and plen- 
teous," and the like. It is enough for my purpose, 
that the Psalmist is seen to value the seclusion and 
freedom of his nation from outside influences and 
unbeliefs, that the true race of sons of Jehovah 
might be educated in the principles of true living, 



180 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



and while they prospered in material blessings, might 
be happy in the knowledge of the Lord as their God. 

Possibly the majority of Christians may be dis- 
posed to think it a peculiarity of the Gospel, that 
those who practice on its plan of life, are to pray 
only after another ideal of blessings ; for instance : 
" Giv e us all manner of trouble and worry ; send us 
vexations and pour out thy rich favors of disappoint- 
ment upon us ; let our sons grow up as stunted trees, 
all gnarled and twisted with liberal opinions and 
misbeliefs of all sorts ; and our daughters be as the 
despised corners of a hut, with as little to admire and 
love as may be about them ; for the true Christian is 
one who despises all earthly advantages and is too 
sublime and up-lifted for the temptations of such 
earthly pleasures and considerations to move him." 

I will not misquote the passages of scripture which 
might be suggested in this connection, to justify this 
hardness of heart; but there is too much of the old 
ascetic spirit, which lingers in the habits of our 
thought, and which is in some respects not as respect- 
able now as it was of old, when men were made of 
sterner stuff. Then it made men suffer in their own 
persons : now it is too apt to lead them to neglect 
the finer duties to others, and to imagine themselves 
to be very strict in their lives, simply because they 
are severe in their notions. It is one of these severe 
notions which cuts the main nerve of influence of the 
home piety, in the right education of young men. It 
cannot be denied, that the Christianity of this democ- 



SONS AT HOME. 



racy of ours, is feminine in excess. The motives 
leading to profession of public care for Christian mor- 
als are such as appeal to them especially. It is pretty 
much given up that it is their department, and the 
weak and designing take advantage of this disturbed 
balance in the public mind, to increase the original 
evil, and to make religion seem a thing of feeling 
rather than of stern principle and righteous obedience. 
We are sometimes asked, " Which are the most relig- 
ious, men or women ? " It is as sensible to ask : 
" Which gives the most light, the sun or the moon?" 
One of the moonlight vagaries of the popular notions 
of duty, is that which would find fault with St. Paul, 
for saying to children : " Honor your parents, for that 
is the first commandment with promise/' They would 
perhaps get the apostle out of the difficulty, by the 
suggestion that the promise, as he meant it, is alto- 
gether spiritual and celestial. I do not invite you to 
follow me now on this higher plane of thought, but 
on one much less sublime and common-place ; on the 
material considerations of the influences of home on 
the boys of a family, in the attempt of parents to 
educate them as men of true character. I propose to 
speak rather to the older son of the family, as the one 
who has the duty imposed on him by nature of set- 
ting an example to the other and younger children. 
He is the natural protector of his brothers in all their 
little fights which make up a part of their lives. They 
wax bold under the wing of his power. He is the 
true knight who puts spear in rest, according to the 



1 82 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



known laws of a chivalry for his sisters, the age of 
which has not yet gone by. The man may look on 
all women as common place. The boy has the same 
dreams of romance which fired the minds of the an- 
cient orders of chivalry. 

I imagine then a home of ordinary healthy boys 
and girls, with an elder brother, who has a fair 
right over the rest in being loved by them, as one 
of themselves, only immensely wiser, and more 
advanced, by a year or tw r o, in the race of life. I 
may say, in passing, that I have in no case imagined 
a perfect home. I began these sermons with the 
idea that the disappointments of life are meant to 
wean us from absorption in this world, and I propose, 
before I get through, to show, that in a proper home 
the downward path of the aged is made smooth in 
the domestic regimen, as guided by the providence 
of God. My one desire in all this scheme of life and 
religion, is to suggest the truth that there is a 
domestic religion and a household Church, as some- 
thing pre-eminent and above the distorted sectarian 
views of the religion of the times. The boy need 
not then be a paragon, nor his home a paradise. 
The average in both will suit me better. 

Two ideas are in the text. Let us look at them, 
t The protection of home from coarse, profane and 
infidel suggestions. Walking through the streets of 
Boston, the other day, in an old-fashioned snow- 
storm, I passed by a little chap of four years of age, 
whose mother had put him out to revel in the 



SOWS AT HOME. 



183 



mysteries of cleaning the pavement, with a hoe two 
feet long. He was booted with huge arctics, not 
quite up to his chin, and an overwhelming i Ulster ' 
on of the jauntiest cut, with the monks-hood of it 
drawn over his wee face, ruddy with health and 
glowing with the importance of his public labors. 
The face told its story of parental devotion. A 
painter could have found it in his heart to sketch the 
young aristocrat I found myself dreaming, as I 
went on, of the cool New-England aristocracy, as I 
have known it in years gone by. The next turn of 
thought, was the sight of a newsboy, tough, sharp 
and self-poised ; not over-clothed ; with hands in 
pocket, as is the vulgar rule now; and not at all 
clean, as is getting to be more and more the rule 
now, with the poor ; but with the man's marks all 
over him, "grown up before his time." The voice 
was sharp, the manner was impudent and self-reliant 
The coolness of his intellect rivalled the snow in 
temperature, but not in whiteness. Now I know, 
that the Great Father of all looks down in tender- 
ness, on both boys ; that a time comes, when all our 
intellectual difficulties about the allotments of each 
condition will be met, in the judgment of Him who 
saw Dives and Lazarus, both here and in the world 
of souls. We however are obliged to look at both 
here primarily, and accept the laws of this imperfect 
world as we see them. No parent now would read 
the story of Dives and Lazarus to his child, and then 
turn him out to work out his salvation, by associa- 



1 84 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



ting with the other. This is an extreme illustration. 
But it suggests my meaning. It is the duty of 
common sense and true godliness as well, to guard 
home from strange children, whose mouth speaketh 
vanity, and often something worse; and their right 
hand, yea and left too, is a hand of falsehood and 
iniquity. 

You guard your children from small-pox, and 
tremble if any one of their young companions has 
been found afflicted with the diphtheria. It is only 
the same fear of the moral impurity, which tells you 
to do as much for their souls. No man can raise a 
tree from a sapling, by tossing it into the earth in 
any and every place, and letting it grow. If another 
overshadows it, if neighbors, neglecting their children, 
allow them indulgences, which you deny yours, you 
will find that the child is not all pure reason ; that it 
does not balance duties by the sage maxims of 
your experience. It feels, it imitates ; it, like the 
magnet and the iron filings, is influenced by the 
power that is nearest to it. Too much intellection 
in a parent is often as bad as too little. They act so 
much by it, that they trust to it, in the affairs of life, 
where far other influences come in and assume 
ascendency. I claim then that the bigotry of a man, 
who denies the liberality of tenderness toward vice 
or evil notions of duty, is just and righteous. I have 
held it to be among the most sacred duties of life, to 
deny promptly and repudiate severely, any wrong 
notion of morals, religion or politics, without regard 



802TS AT HOME. 



i35 



to lesser considerations, if they have ever been 
uttered in the presence of my children. There is no 
grander passage in any book of light literature, than 
that in Thackeray's novel, where old Colonel New- 
come resents the vile language which had been 
used in the presence of his son. In my judgment, 
that boy has not a fair chance for an honest life, 
whose father is either too indifferent or too cowardly 
to do the same. What tree can grow straight, if 
you, who have the keeping of it, dare not put out 
your hand to guide, lest you may be stung by a 
hornet or defiled by a slug ? 

II. The other idea in the text is veiled, but not 
concealed in the metaphor. " Our sons, as plants, 
grown up in their youth." The character which 
marks a young plant in a climate such as Palestine, 
is superabundance of vigor. The Psalmist, on another 
occasion, revels in the picture of a righteous Jew, as 
being like a tree, planted by the water side, which 
bringeth forth his fruit in his season. The young 
sapling, in our forests, or in some sheltered cornel 
of a garden, gives us the feeling of excess of life. It 
is busy in one thing alone — the act of growing. It 
is something so with the boy, in the passage from 
infancy to manhood. There is an excess of the 
physical life. The physical life means a great deal. 
He lives in the present. It is next to impossible to 
induce him to accept the warnings of the weak and 
the aged. Now I maintain, that as with the tree, 
there is the time when the future duties are unknown, 



1 36 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



when the flower and fruit work of the summer and 
fall, and the weary fall of the leaf of the late autumn 
and winter are not only unknown, but really out of 
place ; so the piety of the young boy is not that of 
the grown man, and never will be ; indeed never 
ought to be. It is the error of the weak to try and 
superinduce the character of the gray beard on the 
mind of the inexperienced. In the excessive anxiety 
which we have professed to make all men equal, it is 
to be feared that we have overlooked the fact, in our 
views of morals, that all men are not experienced, 
for a long while; that no man's summer comes 
naturally till after the spring has passed. Of course 
in the excess of the physical life, in the rapid bound- 
ing of the blood, the excitements of the brain and 
the ignorance of the boy, we expect to find greater 
temptations and often greater signs of disagreeable 
and inconvenient animalism. These are the subjects 
of the wise administration of our homes. And here 
I plant myself, as on the strong ground of fact and 
law, that the moral education of home is not to be 
compared with any academical or public system. 
All others may educate the head perhaps as well. 
But this is the divine appointment for regulating the 
heart. 

Given, the educating a healthy boy, out of the 
carnality of our first condition of being, in which we 
are good feeders and sound sleepers, and with vigorous 
health, have the temptations of the excess of vigor. 
I say, that there is in the home of the parents, the 



SONS AT HOME. 



I8 7 



true safeguards, which can be found no where else. 
The Church does not have them. Certainly the 
school does not afford them. 

The boy then is at the minimum of moral reason — 
I say, a healthy boy. There are youthful saints of 
weak health, who show a precocity which is abnor- 
mal, and a conveniency which is sage, but unwhole- 
some. They are exceptions : we need not count 
them in. I speak only of sound, noisy, roystering 
and inconvenient boys, in whom parents take pride, 
even while they wish them asleep. Boys, who give 
occasion for the reproof of ' don't, my son/ twenty 
times an hour. I do not know how much of the 
experience of the class, I may represent ; but boys, 
in my time, were educated to think that they were 
by nature lost forever ; that God was angry with them 
all the time, and every day. They were a class who 
looked upon the minister or deacon as about as 
tempting company as the ghostly inhabitants of the 
graveyard would be. I seem to see a confession of 
the mistake of the past, in the great attention now 
being paid to the celebrations of Sunday-schools, in 
order to attract the young. It will fail. It is no 
more the work of the Church to provide entertain- 
ments and rewards of piety than it is to superintend 
penitentiaries. The object which is aimed at, in 
these things, is the proper duty of the home, not of 
the Church. I am very much obliged to my neighbor 
if he thinks fit to give my children any pleasure as a 
reward for what he likes in them, but before he 



ISS THE GHUJSGH OF HIE HOUSEHOLD. 



creates a system of doing it, and requires me to 
follow his example, it may be well to ask if there are 
no other and better ways of regulating one's family. 
If religion is not lovely in itself, can we make it so 
by appeals to other considerations ? That religious 
culture is the best which is the truest to the wants 
of all classes. As the child of a Puritan is seen at 
times to desert the bald service of Congregationalism 
for a liturgy, so the question is not to be met in this 
case, by any half-way measures of popularizing a 
bald system. It is vital, in my judgment, to have a 
Church, in which the boys shall grow up into it as 
naturally as they did into the Church of the Israelites; 
as they do into the great Churches of the nations 
of Europe. 

In boyhood, the reason, and with it the gravity of 
age is not developed, or they ought not to be. In 
spite of all the geniuses of two-and-twenty, who 
aspire to pass our laws and regulate our morals, or 
who convert thousands, with the story of their 
immoralities, it is still true that the old have 
experience, which in its homely way teaches know- 
ledge of good and evil. " With the ancient is 
wisdom; and in length of days understanding." In 
the growing time of life, the influences from without 
are the strongest. In other words, the senses are 
the chief avenues of knowledge. The thinking on 
abstract premises is at its minimum. The reflection 
comes afterward. Then is the time of laying up the 
stores of food for that reflection, The chief life is 



SOWS AT HOME. 



189 



that of the perceptions and the affections. The 
sentiments are in their unformed protoplasm. The 
sap is poured into the new channels, and the very 
body is developing a& yet towards its future condi- 
tion. It is then that the home is the divine provision 
for the true education of the future man. 

This is the Scripture idea. Look at the carefulness 
oi Moses in teaching the people, to guide their own 
sons and guide them at home. The priest, as he 
regarded him, w r as to keep knowledge, and the high- 
priest was to offer sacrifices of atonement, and 
consult the oracle; but the religious education of the 
men and women was committed to the home- 
influences. " These words, which I command thee 
this day, shall be in thine heart, and thou shalt teach 
them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of 
them when thou sittest in thine house, and when 
thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, 
and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them 
for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as 
frontlets between thine eyes." This is the father's 
work, not the preacher's. So, "when the son, in 
time to come, asketh thee what are these testimonies, 
statutes and judgments of the Lord;" the answer was 
to come from the father, not from the priest alone, 
while the father stood by and said nothing. Again 
and again Moses returns to this idea. He founds 
the promise of prosperity on it. "That your days 
may be multiplied and the days of thy children in 



190 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to 
give them." 

It is the same idea of the first commandment with 
promise : the palladium of a nation's safety, is in 
the honor of parents by the children. Look at your 
own nation. This nation is reeling in the balance 
to-day by vices which show the want of this home 
honor. No man deliberately teaches his son to steal 
or lie. If he steals himself or lies himself, he sends 
his boy away to be taught by some one else not to 
do such things. Some one else either reasons it all 
out in the forms of the school, or denounces it in the 
language of the pulpit. But God did not commit it 
to either, but to you, and to you first. The boy is 
not yet so much under the influence of reason, and 
he is not improved in Christian manhood by threats. 
He is best led by his affections, by his sensational 
experiences. He can see your honor. He can take 
pride in the proofs of your truthfulness. He can be 
interpenetrated by the atmosphere of your regimen, 
for he has in him the mystery of filial love and a 
likeness of nature. You may be the most meagre of 
men to others, who know what it takes to make a 
man ; but to him, you are yet the Bayard, without 
reproach. No man is so absolutely a fool, that he 
cannot be true and honest. And if he is so, in the 
secrets of his family life, he may inspire a character 
in his children, which will plant their feet in the 
paths of virtue, even, if in later age, they find him 
out. Let then the home be the one place, where the 



SONS AT HOME. 



IQI 



reign of truth is absolute. If they persecute you 
with criticisms of the very Bible, be true, even if the 
heavens fall. Do not try and convince him, that 
Abraham did not tell a lie, when you know that he 
did, nor suggest that the wild woman Jael, had an in- 
spiration for an act of assassination. Forms may die 
and systems may change, but the truth is safe to live, 
if we dare trust to it The stars in their courses 
fought against the false interpretations of the monks 
and demolished them, but true goodness came out 
of the struggle, washed and purified for a greater 
triumph. The Church of the future will be all the 
better for a race of believers in the truth, even if many 
a year's foliage of the young plants of the centuries 
fall and change into mould-food for its growth. 

II. But again and finally : the boy wants in his 
home, what only can be found there, the education 
of his chivalry for woman. For all sound boys, from 
ten to twenty, there is no company on the broad 
earth like his mother and sisters, The poet, Young, 
says, that : 

" At thirty man suspects himself a fool ; 
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan." 

This is partly a libel, and partly a fact. It is cer- 
tain that up to that time he is not in the native exer- 
cise of his cooler reason. He is in the receptive 
state, and still unbalanced. The Jewish priests began 
their work, as men, at thirty, though they were 
priests, by inheritance, up to that time. Certainly be- 
fore that period the character for life, in the matter of 



192 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the relation of the sexes, is formed. It is said that 
the age of chivalry is past. So it is claimed that the 
age of faith is over. So the same doubters might 
stand in the woods on this March day and declare 
that the age of the trees was past. He does not see 
a green leaf anywhere. The winds howl through 
bare branches and the buds are all hid away where 
the frost put them safely in God's keeping last 
October. The dry forms of last year's growth rattle 
underneath the naked branches, and the sky is leaden 
and prosaic. " Great Pan is dead." But it is all a 
lie. The spring is on us now. The gnomes are at 
work under every foot of ground now, and the young 
are in their spring. The character of a people and of 
their laws and religion are things which do not die in 
changing. And I may say, that nothing in all the 
range of our ideas is more important, as the laws or 
the religion of any people, than this thing which men 
once called chivalry,— the faiths of men and women in 
each other's truth, courtesy, and chastity. What if 
the knight, in his quest for adventures of righting the 
wrongs of the fair and weak, at last developed into 
Don Quixote and euphuists of the Tudor reigns, and 
became offensive in Chesterfields and other coxcombs 
of Burke's day— they did what, would God some pow- 
er might do for us— they roused the world to a juster 
view of the purity of the religion of Christ than be- 
longed to the ascetics and monks, in their lazy hives. 
Our mechanical progress in all the arts of social com- 
fort, needs and will have the re-assertion of the same 



SONS AT HOME. 



193 



principles which inspired the songs of Spenser, and 
drove the Puritans to come out of the corrupt world 
of the Stuarts, to plant a purer vine on these shores. 
There is a time of life when a sound idea and a true 
faith in woman, is as essential to a man's honor and 
health of soul — well, say as in anything else — in priests, 
preachers or dogmas. " There is a generation/' saith 
Solomon, " that curseth their father, and doth not bless 
their mother. A generation pure in their own eyes, 
and yet not washed from their filthiness. ,, From 
such, good Lord, deliver us ! In the first and critical 
time of life, the Sunday-school teacher may reason in 
vain : the Church may warn to no purpose ; it is not 
the vocation of either to ensure success — the real les- 
son is read at home. The combination of the real and 
the poetic there, the balance of love and familiarity 
which it affords, is the fountain of healthy life, to 
compact the character of these young plants, grown 
up in their youth. The problem of life in everything 
is to rule the passions, by the spirit. In early youth, 
the spirit rules by the affections. Therefore the home 
is the first church, that is generally necessary to sal- 
vation, in this world at least. God will provide for 
the prodigals, if they repent Has he made no pro- 
vision for those who stay at home ? Christ came to 
call sinners : what does he for Timothy, who was not a 
publican, nor in its usual sense, a sinner ? It is for 
men to think of these things, to accept the Church 
and purify it, if it is in error, that it may 
move in the plane of their natural duties to 
1^ 



194 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



their children. It is the one question of the hour, to 
find where the difficulty is that the young men are 
the last to come into the Church. If it is in the 
Church, let us make it right there. If it is in our 
ideas of the religion of our homes, let us take a better 
view of them. 



XII. 

DAUGHTERS IN THE HOME. 

"That our daughters may be as corner stones, polished after the simu 
litude of a palace. ,} —TsALM cxliv. 12. 

Prayer-Book Version. — "That our daughters may be as the polish- 
ed corners of the temple" 

Vulgate. — " Filice eorum composites; zircumornattz ut similitudo tem- 

pli." 

LXX. — g3? ojuoi/tia vocov. 

Hebrew.— Ha heel, ^fl (Temple-palace). 

HE word polished, is given in the margin 
as cut, i.e., carved. Probably, as there is 
no record of any polished pillars in the 
temples about Palestine, or in the land of 
Egypt, with which alone David could have had any 
knowledge, and the temple of Solomon was not then 
in existence, it is better to read the word, as carved. 
There was an intimate connection between the rites 
of worship of the ancient temples, and the caryatides, 
or corner pillars, which symbolized certain ideas, 
which lay underneath the mysterious doctrines of 
Way of Life. The face of the sphynx, which often 
guarded and silently kept that Way, in the temple- 
worship of Egypt, was often a calm female face, 
looking with wide-open eyes over the desert sands, 
as if waiting for the coming of the One who was to 




196 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



solve the riddle ih her keeping. Or if we think of 
the Psalm as written by some author later than the 
time of Solomon, which is quite possible, then the 
reference would be natural to the two pillars, which 
were carved by the cunning hand of the architect of the 
temple, Hiram of Tyre. It is related of him : " And 
he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple : and 
he set up the right pillar, and he called the name 
thereof Jachin : and he set up the left pillar, and he 
called the name thereof Boaz. And upon the top of 
the pillars was lily-work: so was the work of the 
pillars finished." It is known that these pillars were 
made for ornament and symbol only, as they sup- 
ported no part of the building. It seems to me, to 
be suggested at least by the narrative, that they 
were the work of the man Hiram, rather than of 
Solomon. 

Josephus finds fault with Solomon for permitting 
the figures of the cherubim to be woven in the veils of 
the hangings of the Holy Place, as if it were a viola- 
tion of the law of Moses, which forbade any figure 
whatever to be used in divine service. It is alto- 
gether possible, that this allowance of art, in these two 
particulars, may be traced to the Tyrian workman. 
If so, it is to be attributed to the sense of true art. 
No cut or carved stone work could be permitted in 
or on the solid stones of the building. The veils, it 
seems, might be, in the opinion of Solomon, woven 
with the one figure of the sphynx or cherubim, which 
had been transferred from the gate of Eden and eter- 



DAUGHTERS IN THE HOME. 



197 



nalized in religious culture, in every known temple 
of his day. So while all the columns which actually 
supported the temple of a jealous God were severely 
simple, he seems to have permitted the widow's son to 
leave this personal mark of his poetic sense and art be- 
hind him. Two pillars of molten brass, of exquisite 
finish, and profound suggestiveness, w r ere allowed to 
stand out in the porch ; as if to testify in all coming 
time against the exclusive bigotry of an elected 
people. They were the sign-manual of the pagan 
architect of the stately building. They were his 
claim, and the claim of all uncovenanted nations in 
him, to rights in that house of prayer, which the 
architect of the True Temple " not of this building," 
should yet establish and set on sure foundations. 
They mutely told of it as " the house of prayer for 
all people;" and whenever perverted from that end, 
then becoming the " den of thieves." Abarbinel, 
the Jewish scholar, conjectures that they typified the 
Pillar of Cloud and the Pillar of Fire that went be- 
fore the tribes in the desert, and signified the Divine 
Providence, as always over the place where Jehovah 
at last placed His name. If so, then it is a beauti- 
ful thought, in the course of the after development 
of that providence, that they owed them to the skill 
of a pagan, who claimed a part in the mercy of the 
Hebrew's God. Jachin represented the cloud, and 
Boaz, the fire or light: the former protecting all 
true worshippers by day from the solar heat, the 
other, by night, from stumbling in the dark. It is 



198 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



plain that Hiram exhausted his skill in the finish of 
them. And if the allusion of the text is supposed to 
be to them, it gives us a thought as to the proper 
education of the virgin-life of a nation, which is most 
striking and expressive. The writer has prayed that 
the young men may be as plants of vigorous growth, 
which have been made strong and hardy by their 
education. They appear to have grown up in the 
open air. They are supposed to be able to take the 
assaults of the storms and the beating of the tem- 
pests, and only rooted themselves the deeper the 
wilder they blew. His words of them signify large- 
ness and fulness of vigorous growth. In all semi- 
civilized nations, the need of muscular vigor could 
well be the subject of religious meditation. But on 
the turn of his pen he brings before us the ideal of 
womanly perfection, and while seizing the most 
beautiful thing known to him as his model, he finds 
it in the porch of the temple. Yea, (if I am correct, 
in my fancy, as to the relation of it to Hiram,) in that 
religious cultivation and tenderness of the sex, which 
poets and evangelists are supposed to delight to 
honor. To be earnest, in sensitive convictions, is 
natural to her. We look to her 

6 ' For a waking dream made good, 
For an ideal understood, 
For a Christian womanhood. 

For a marvellous gift to cull 
From our common life and dull 
Whatsoe'er is beautiful."* 



* Whittier. 



DAUGHTERS IN THE HOME. 1 99 



We look to her to be the medium of that tender- 
ness which keeps open the catholicity of that creed, 
whose highest assertion is that God is love. It is the 
prize of her high calling. It is a creed which the in- 
tellect is the last to reach ; the heart, the first. 

One word more of explanation. The one reading 
of the text, as you notice, is the corners of a palace ; 
the other, of a temple. They are the same. In the 
ancient times, the king was somehow divine. His 
house was, ipso facto, a temple. The two ideas meet 
in the word used in the Hebrew, the hakeel, the pal- 
ace-temple. The Tabernacle of Jehovah was called 
so. It was the palace where the king of the tribes 
dwelt ; the temple of their covenant God. So in the 
symbolizing of the temple, by the body of man, 
which runs through the Bible, the object of female 
culture has its place in the polished corners of the 
court, where the two spells of Jachin and Boaz, Light 
and Truth, secure the favor of the Divine Providence, 
and keep for man the way of life. They are not to 
be desired, " as the young plants grown up in their 
youth/ ' They are not valued for their muscle, or 
mannishness of any sort. Whether they are equal or 
in any way superior or inferior, is not alluded 
to. They are not the same. They do not come 
into the same line of thought in the mind of 
the sacred writers. We reflect on the figure of 
the Psalm — whether the lovely caryatides, as seen 
in the corners of the temple or palace, or the two 
highly ornamented pillars of Hiram standing in the 



200 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



porch of the sternly plain edifice of Solomon— and the 
religious aspiration for their proper cultivation becomes 
poetic, in spite of us. As we cultivate in them the 
ideal of their capacities, the tenderness of piety, the 
gentleness of sympathy, the chaste whiteness of soul, 
the lofty aspirations which belong to them, the yearn- 
ings of that moral courage that begets in them the 
grandest results of patience and hope in darkness ; in 
a word, that higher life, which shows one of them, 
at times, wasted away to a skeleton, with two-thirds 
of the mortal dust sifted out in the fiery trial of con- 
sumption; and in its place, the gleamings of the 
spiritual body of the resurrection, almost shining 
through;— as we do this, they reward us. They 
stand for us in the porch of every temple, and relig- 
ious abstractions become the reality of a reasonable 
and holy hope. 

I have seen a woman lie down to await the coming 
of the surgeon, who, as it proved, only opened for her 
the gate of death, with this feeling superior to all oth- 
ers : « If I could be assured, that by bearing the agonies 
of this disease, I could prolong my life for only three 
years, that I might see this grandchild grow to where 
I could safely leave him, I could not dare to meet this 
horrible operation : but the physicians assure me that 
I cannot, and I do- it for him." And she did it as 
cooly as if it were only a deed of pleasure; and she 
died, as bravely as any martyr. If there be no truth 
in religion, what a fool she was ; and what fools men 
are, to ever attempt to disturb the faith which would 



DAUGHTERS IN THE HOME. 



20I 



deprive them of her consolations and themselves of 
such devotion. And if there be any truth in the re- 
ligion which we profess, then it has taken its shading 
and color of sentiment from the sex which is seen to 
be capable of such heroism. Surely, the fact is sig- 
nificant, that its first promise of a possible reconcilia- 
tion with God, was addressed to woman ; and that 
that way required the interposition of the Deity, to 
begin anew from her alone the race of the sons of 
God. 

It was, then, to no chance form, of expression : that 
our daughters should be as the carved pillars of the 
temple. There is a religious idea inseparable to the 
right education of the female mind. Men may arro- 
gate to themselves the right to refine the intellectual 
speculations of the religious sense, and to defend the 
specific doctrines which express the oracles of God ; 
but the interests of pure and undefiled religion are 
committed to the finer senses of the heart, and the 
sensibilities of those natures which can distance all 
speculations, by the grace of their delicate constitu- 
tions. We do not look on the Farnese Hercules to 
think of the realities of the world of souls. We do 
not hang delighted over the Moses of Michael Angelo 
to dream of the spiritual triumphs of the spirit over 
the things of sense. They are well, in their way. 
But it is the way of strength, of energy and firmness 
in restraining the savage and wild portions of our 
common nature. Among men we go to the Beloved 
Disciple, who saw the things of the inner heart of 



202 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



Christ, and of the Paradise of God ; and who re- 
ceived in charge from Christ the care of his mother, 
and no less of the Church. The scenes of the cross, 
that draw us now most strongly to divine things, as 
if it were the New Temple not made with hands, 
certainly has the two pillars of Jachin and Boaz, in 
the presence of the virgin and her associates, through 
all that gloomy day, when His disciples had forsaken 
Him and fled. It seems to me that the text is true 
to nature in its having involved in the metaphor the 
two ideas, that the education of our daughters de- 
mands the recognition of the sense of beauty, and 
the instinct of religion. As we think of the two 
pillars in the temple porch, the two thoughts come 
up of themselves; of their artistic beauty, and of 
their religious use. So : 

L The home should aim to rear its daughters by 
the rules of a sacred art, to the standard of the beau- 
tiful. It may shock some Christian to hear that there is 
an acknowledged standard of beauty, which religion 
cannot safely neglect. But we who expend so much on 
the cultivation of the arts of religion, cannot be trou- 
bled at any such news. I hear some one murmuring 
to himself, " Whose adorning let it not be that out- 
ward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of 
gold, or of putting on of apparel." To all of which I 
say a devout x\men. It is the perversion of the in- 
stincts of truth, to exhaust the sense of the beautiful 
on the body alone. If the female has the power to 
excite in the minds of men the ideas of a diviner 



DAUGHTERS IN TEE HOME. 



203 



quality of soul, and she spend all her energies on the 
adornment of the person, it is a horrible perversion. 
It is the worst form of irreligion. It is like the 
Church of Laodicea, which lost the duty of showing 
Christ, in the display of wealth and respectability. 
But is there no use for a farther study in this same 
text of the old Jew, St. Peter ? " But let it be the 
hidden man of the heart, in that which is not cor- 
ruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet 
spirit." It is to be observed, that he is exhorting 
them all the while to religion as a beauty. It is as 
an ornament, that he would have them love it. Thus 
the " holy women of old adorned themselves." The 
Quakers have curiously exemplified the whole sub- 
ject. They adorn a plain dress by the beauty of 
their lives ; and testify to a fact, which does not de- 
mand a philosopher nor a prophet to declare ; that 
if they do it, they give to the plainest silk and the 
closest hat, all the splendors of gold and silver in the 
eyes of men. Our fashions of dress, in my time, have 
been sufficiently hideous to startle an African Fan. 
But a few days familiarity with the most outre, and 
the wearer is thought of, and not the disguise. If the 
world declares ornaments of gold unfashionable, it 
passes a ban on the metal. It might be questioned, 
if in any such case it would not be the proper mor- 
tification of believers, to wear it. It is the purest 
folly to rest long in the idea that St. Peter is any 
authority to Christian women as to the matter of the 
style of dress. As to its spirit, whether it shall ex- 



204 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



press the intellect of a butterfly or of a saintly woman, 
who has a place in the temple of her God, who has a 
mission to her race, to adorn the doctrine of God her 
Saviour, and win others to things that are lovely and 
of good report, he has spoken like a man of God and 
a sensible man, in warning them as to the ornament 
of the soul rather than the body. 

It is the object of a true home to educate this 
sense of beauty ; this 

" hearts ease 
Of congenial sympathies." 

It is just as much the duty of parents to do it, as it is 
their duty to raise their sons to be strong and healthy 
citizens. We are practising compulsory education in 
the things of arithmetic and geography ; would it 
not be the duty of the State, to prevent the families 
of its citizens from mutilating their sons, and making 
them cripples ? The State is ordained of God, just 
as much as any Bishop is. If it is, it has the duty to 
call on all for strong men, for its uses; to train all to 
work, and mind their own business in peace, and to 
be sturdy soldiers in the time of war. So the State, 
if we go no higher, is bound to ask for pure and 
worthy women ; women preserved to their own sta- 
tions and of good health and true lives, to adorn their 
stations. The daughters of Israel, who had been 
trembling for weeks, at the news of the terrific giant, 
in Ephes-dammim, must gather to welcome the re- 
turn of the young Bethlehemite with dances and 



205 



songs, and they must be worthy of such a duty, in 
order to make it a fitting reward to him. 

Now home educates this sense of life-beauty, this 
refined woman-thought ; this " ornament of a meek 
and quiet spirit. ,, It shows itself, not only in the 
dress, but in the whole daily life. It is a sense of 
moral graces, of which the whole outer life is the 
inevitable expression. It is involved in the very 
thought of a woman. Find one who does not have 
it, and the instinct recoils from her at once. In- 
spect the crowds of girls who cross the South Ferr/ 
of a morning before eight o'clock, and the want of 
cleanliness, the coarse display of tawdry ornaments 
and the bold looks and loud voices are all in keeping, 
and by no means a pleasant sight. It is not an ac- 
cident, that these things go together. It is not an 
accident that the refined woman is instinct with a 
keen perception of her duties, in preserving the true 
standard of all matters of form. I hesitate not to say, 
that if the female sex had not, for the last hundred 
years, put the invincible barrier of their instinct as to 
beauty of forms, in true things, that this American 
race would in mere wantonness of a fancied spiritu- 
alness, be to-day relapsing into the rudeness of the 
Turks. 

Home is the school for developing the aesthetic 
character. I mean, cesthetic, in the best sense of 
moral beauty and force. And my duty is done, if I 
can persuade you that it ought to do this very thing. 
You may teach your daughters to dress, act and 



206 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



speak, by the best models, with a general notion that 
it is the proper thing for society ; that it is the fair 
thing to do ; that it may improve their prospects in 
the race of fashion ; that it reflects discredit on you to 
seem to neglect it. But I claim a higher sense of duty 
than any such selfish and earthly considerations as 
these. It is the religious use of a home of Christians, 
that it should plant the emotional life of the sensitive 
child-natures on the impregnable basis of instinctive 
truth. It is the beauty of good people that they be 
trained from the first dawn of reason, to act by the 
inviolable laws of things lovely and of good report, 
so that they become gentle, whether men or women, 
by a distinction which all gladly and admiringly ad- 
mit on sight When that man, Hiram of Tyre, 
moulded those pillars, Jachin and Boaz, he claimed 
the right of superior genius, to do it. He did not go 
out in the by-ways to take the popular vote, and ask 
of the wayfarer the privilege to attempt the highest 
form of the beautiful that the law allowed. He drew 
his inspiration from nature ; and while not trenching 
on the rights of men to be as unlovely as neglect 
and indifference might make them, he asserted the 
power of the beautiful, as a fitting tribute to the wor- 
ship of the Lord of hosts. He felt, with Solomon, 
that it was well, that " the king's daughter should be 
all glorious within, and her clothing of wrought gold, 
that she might be brought to the king in raiment of 
needle- work, with gladness and rejoicing." Religion 
needs and can make use of every moral force. It is 



DAUGHTERS IN 



TEE SOME. 



207 



one of the greatest of moral forces, the instinctive 
power of the refined mind, to act right, and to exem- 
plify truth in the very way of self-poise, to do 
things that others do, but with a grace that adorns 
the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things. If 
this was the chivalry that adorned the aristocracies 
of the old world ; if the sneer is levelled at us, that 
we are shoddy in manners and tastes ; it is time that 
we asserted the power of a better religion and a 
purer standard of national taste. Let us acknowl- 
edge the power of these graces, and then cultivate 
them. The girls of a family are its precious trust. 
They are committed to the parents to be moulded, 
by the delicate methods of moral and religious educa- 
tion, that they may be something the better for their 
Christian parentage. A profession of religion cannot 
more atone, in this world, for a bad taste, that leaves 
us a coarse, indelicate subject, than it can for a dis- 
honest character or a vulgar believer. Let the 
rights of all men be unquestioned. The duties of 
the thinking to be all that may exalt the common 
crowd, are beyond dispute. All the finer graces of 
character are personified, for our understanding, by 
the female form and life. 

The old covenant, was the "Virgin Daughter of 
Judah;" the new is best known as the Bride of 
Christ. Almost all the very vocables of grace 
of the languages, are in the feminine, by an infallible 
law. Now I maintain, that no man's conception of 
any truth goes higher than the facts in his knowl- 



2CS THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



edge. If his mother and sisters are coarse and 
untrue, false in dress and unfaithful to the finer in- 
stincts, he suffers a loss. And if the whole woman- 
hood of a place is so, the manners of the entire 
population suffer ; even if the preacher have the 
genius of Jonathan Edwards. Religion becomes 
unlovely. It is as if one should cover up a faultless 
statue with dust and cobwebs, and claim to do it 
for the glory of God. In my judgment, the strongest 
power of purity in common life, which no sort of 
eloquent exposition can equal, and no scientific de- 
tail of evil issues can atone for, is concealed in the 
due regard for the might and wholesome influences 
of beauty, as in things seen, so above all the rest, in 
the manners and graces which reveal the unseen 
things of the soul. 

What is called public corruption begins in the loss 
of faith in tilings, lovely and of good report; things 
which assert themselves, not so much by words as by 
the attractions of living factors. As to special rules 
of educating girls to this higher thought of their 
mission in life, I have not the time to do it now, nor 
is it my thought to do more than contest the fancy 
that it is a Christian thing to neglect it at home. The 
skilful gardener cultivates the various flowers of 
different climates by rules which he learns from ex- 
perience. Only persuade him that it is not his duty 
to put all alike out into the frosty nights of January, 
and expect the peach-pit and the passion flower to 
be alike benefitted by the exposure. He will learn 



'DAUGHTERS IN THE HOME. 



209 



the rest for himself. There is an instinct in all 
worthy men, to protect women. It is based on the 
idea, that the protection not only is necessary, but 
that it is its own sure reward. 

II. Finally, this figure of the text, like polished 
corners of the temple, — if it means no more, cer- 
tainly shows us that the mind of the inspired author 
of the Psalm somehow confused the thoughts of 
comely virgins and the temple of the Lord. I think 
that the same thing runs through all language. I 
could prove, if it were questioned, that it underlies 
all religious revelation of the most attractive things 
about God. But I draw now only a single practical 
inference ; that the beauty of holiness is somehow in- 
timately connected with the right home education of 
our girls. Jachin and Boaz reared their fair beauty, 
carved all over, until the simple Hebrew language of 
that age seems to have been too meagre to tell us of 
it, as it struck the imagination of the venerable 
scribe who described the structure of the temple. 

They were placed just where the priests must 
always see them, while engaged in their bloody rites. 
The high-priest must go between them, whenever he 
prepared to offer atonement for the sins of the peo- 
ple. If they symbolized the pillar of cloud and fire, 
or the Divine Providence, whose secret place was be- 
hind the veils, they won him to a passing recognition 
of the fact, that there was a beauty of life, which was 
acceptable to that awful Being. If they signified the 
Light and Truth, worn on the temple's bosom as the 
14 



210 THE CHUBCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



same were worn on his own, on the breastplate of his 
Urim and Thummim, by which he became the keeper 
of the oracles of God; then they taught him how 
true, and pure and beautiful must be the nation's heart, 
if he would offer acceptably the sacrifices of righteous- 
ness for his people. 

So, in my way of looking at life, the daughters of 
Christian homes are like these polished corners of the 
spiritual temple ; they are inextricably involved in the 
best thoughts of things divine. Whether the sexes 
are equal or not, I do not care to know, any more 
than I care to know which God loves best, an oak- 
tree or a Victoria lily. If you are making ships or 
gun carriages, give me the firm-knit and tough tim- 
ber of the live oak. If it is to pause and wonder 
what God made things beautiful for, why it is that it 
has power over men since old Homer compacted the 
Greek nation into one tremendous force, by the ma- 
jesty of song, and will continue to rule us, till the 
perfected consummation of sainted humanity shall ap- 
pear coming down out of heaven, " as a bride adorned 
for her husband," then I ask for the lily. It was 
certainly not a woman who died on the cross : but it 
was not the son of a man, either. I see standing 
around the cross, one man only of the twelve disciples, 
and all the women apparently who followed Christ 
from Galilee. One pronounced disciple, a friend of 
the high-priest, and two timid, uncommitted follow- 
ers, safe because of previous timidity, and two bands 
of women, are last at the cross and earliest at the 



DAUGHTERS IX THE ROME. 



211 



grave. One thing I do know, that the same educa- 
tion of a true home will make out of the sons and 
daughters entirely different modes of grace. It has 
been so. It will be so to the end. If ever there 
was a community of Christians in which one had the 
right to give warnings on this theme, it is this. Let 
us accept the intimation of the soul, and the history of 
all religions, and value the tenderness and protect the 
innocence of woman. Let us pray that our sons may 
grow up like plants, grown large in a happy youth, 
with healthy muscle, and honest, tough timber of 
manly character ; and not desire any competition, on 
that line, of our daughters ; content if they become 
lovely and religious ; fit to stand in the temple 
porches of God. 



XIII. 




EDUCATION OF HOME. 

" Thy children like olive branches around thy table."— Psalm 
cxxviii. 3. 

VERY man has two kinds of knowledge; 
that which he takes cognizance of and 
prides himself on, as something which re- 
flects honor on him: and then, and quite 
distinct from the other, that which he absorbs from 
the unspoken experience of life. Of this he is apt to 
take little notice. He is not ready to recognize in it 
the same complacent reflex praises of himself. When 
he is able to quote the writings of learned men, or 
set others right as to the latitudes of things, he 
is touched to the pleased quick, with the refreshing 
sense of what it is to be among the better educated. 
All the while he is acting by an unconscious set of 
motives, which he has in part inherited as the legacy 
of his predecessors, and partly acquired from the 
atmosphere in which he has been reared. This is 
the education which makes the man. It is not so 
compulsory as to be final and irresistible, but it is of 
the greatest influence and of the deepest line-engrav- 
ing of any. You may write the palimpsests of inten- 
tion on the pages of the soul, in later years, but the 



EDUCATION OF HOME. 



213 



original characters are never quite effaced in this 
world. It is due to this law, that we often see the 
old man who has wandered from the home of his 
childhood and spent his entire life in some other 
country, returning, in imagination, as he grows weaker 
with age, to the scenes of that period of his life, and 
recollecting the incidents of the first years of life 
with startling freshness; while the more important 
events of the day pass by him unnoticed, or 
evanescent. And sometimes it happens that a re- 
formed character, that is one formed first under evil, 
and then re-formed under more respectable circum- 
stances, that such a character appears to wear quite 
well, as long as the masculine vigor is occupied with 
the business and distractions of the world, but be- 
comes rusty and ragged, in age. The masker has 
often staid too long at the ball. The mask is seen 
to slip from his heavy hand, and the face below is 
not so lovely as one would wish. In this age, when 
the prodigal son is so often the ideal saint — the 
Apollo of the pulpit — it is questionable whether this 
experience of characters that have been formed 
normally, according to the laws of nature, and then 
re-formed on the models of theory, is not so much 
the rule as to make such remarks offensive. After 
that unhappy young man had recovered the shock of 
pleasure at the welcome of his old father, and had 
settled down to the monotony of home, what think 
you was his experience of the penalties of reforma- 
tion of character ? True, before his luckless journey, 



214 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



he had been troubled, as so many of the young are 
always, with the restlessness of curiosity, the sur- 
misings of what might be the taste of the fruit of the 
tree of knowledge of good and evil ; but what was 
that to the sense of passions half-burned out, which 
the memory was busy kindling with the sparks of 
that earthly wisdom, which is sensual and devilish. 
Scenes of putrid pleasure, in which all things had been 
foul and degrading, came back to pollute his peace. 
The forms of evil obtruded themselves between him 
and his best affections. The rites of Baal instilled 
doubts into his faith in the Lord God of His fathers, and 
the obscene orgies of Astarte left their burning marks 
on his daily consciousness, as the fiery lava marks its 
fatal course on the valleys of the volcano. When 
will men learn that there are some things which it is 
a vast folly to know ? That the scene of Eden is 
being repeated constantly around them; and men 
and women are wandering out of the sacred gates of 
home, to find the world a desert before them? Even 
the worst men in the world, if they be at all thought- 
ful, are seen to become indignant at the crime of 
robbing a soul of its innocence, and to detest the 
keen and prompt knowledge of the corrupt ways of 
the world, which they themselves practice, and by 
which they suffer. It is a remarkable fact that St. 
James, the settled pastor of one place, has occasion 
to emphasize the distinction between these two kinds 
of knowledge. The evidences of it came daily be- 
fore his eye. He says: " This wisdom," that is that 



EDUCATION OF HOME. 



215 



of envying and strife, and the like, " descendeth not 
from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. The 
wisdom which descendeth from above is first pure, 
then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of 
mercy and good fruits, without wrangling and with- 
out hypocrisy ; and the fruit of righteousness is sown 
in peace of them that make peace." Ch. iii. 15-18. 

This heavenly wisdom is not learned from books 
nor Sunday-schools, nor pulpits. It descendeth 
from above, and the sacramental sources of it are 
home-influences, primarily and chiefly. It was 
taught in the older system of revelation, by the 
parent. I need not go again through the common 
school laws of Moses, as they lie in the Pentateuch. 
He elected the father as the pedagogue of each 
family, without appeal. I only remind you that the 
Israelites were under the same laws when Paul and 
Timothy were being educated, and for some genera- 
tion or more afterwards. If so, then nothing can be 
farther from their intentions, in anything that they 
may have said than the thought of undermining this 
influence. The Bible is the word of God. I doubt 
it not, no, not for a moment. But it was intended to 
align the various duties of life, not to transcend them. 
Neither it nor the pulpit can give any one the 
wisdom which descendeth from above. Or if they 
could, it would not be from above in their cases, but 
from the book or from the desk. Now the words 
" descended from above " are emphatic. They 
mean something. They are opposed to the wisdom 



216 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

Which is earthly and natural ; that which is acquired, 
and perverted. There is a virgin bloom in inno- 
cence, which is the sweetest and holiest thing that is 
known to man, in his experience. The fortitude of 
the saint and martyr is grander and more direct in 
its teaching of the majesty of a will to conquer evil. 
But the innocence of the unsunned soul which sim- 
ply knows no evil, is the lingering odor of Eden. It 
is a revelation to itself. It is the reminder of the 
first dream of man, and it suggests the strongest 
hope of some life in which it is to be renewed as the 
law and constant beatitude. This old Eden story is 
told over and over again, in every Christian home. 
The walls of the father's house are the mountains 
which fence the little ones in from the world. There 
run the four rivers, on whose shores are bdellium and 
gold, where no evil can enter, or cannot long linger. 
There the coarsest toys and the plainest blocks & are 
adorned with the bright beams of the infantile fancy, 
and the poorest room becomes populous with chang- 
ing company. There, long before the mysteries of 
the Arabic or Roman alphabet torment the immature 
mind, the young Adamite has been studying from the 
models before him in daily life. Looks tnd tones, 
gestures and deeds have been his primer. There 
has been in him too the secret magnetic force of 
filial descent. The books that he studies are live 
things to him. He reads them by. an untaught 
faculty, that teaches the whole animal creation to 
imitate: that educates the young beaver to the 



EDUCATION OF HOME, 



2l 7 



finest achievements of engineering, and tells the 
titmouse how to calculate the diameter of an in- 
verted dome. Only on the higher scale of his 
moral nature he is busy, weighing whether honesty 
pays ; whether it is true that it is Godlike to chain 
the tiger temper. He is thoughtful, as to the mean- 
ing of little scenes of hypocrisy, that have gone on 
under his eye. True! he does not formulate any 
propositions or suggest critical enthymemes, but he 
does a deal of thinking, none the less. He receives 
on a virgin soul, the impressions that strike deep 
and last long. He is largely plastic, like soft clay, 
on which the fowls of heaven and earth are making 
their tracks, before it hardens and keeps them hidden 
for better or for worse. He is then, too, more of the 
animal than the philosopher. A paramount animal- 
ism and a dormant reasoning power then — we call on 
the noblest natures to spare him, and join to guard 
him from the assaults of the evil influences of the 
corrupt world. It is a part of that wonderful ele- 
ment of the Christian dream of the God of revelation, 
in which it differs totally from all the schemes of 
human devising, that Christ stands by the cradle of 
every infant, to warn nurse and mother to reverence 
the innocence aud recognize the awful presence of 
the cherubim of the divine presence as there to guard 
them from rudeness. Your angel and mine are min- 
istering spirits, engaged still in the work of helping 
us somewhere on the track between this and the 
better world : " Their angels do always stand in the 



218 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



presence of the Father in heaven," ever ready to 
appeal against the wrong doer. And lest we should 
not be moved to fear this sort of sacrilege, Jesus 
stands near them, to move us to pity them and 
reverence them as his own nearest exemplars, say- 
ing to us : " Of such is the kingdom of heaven." 
The way of life was pointed out to the grown up 
men who stood about Him, as lying near the cradle 
of infancy, namely, the unlearning all their earthly 
wisdom ; the surrender of their low dreams of worldly 
progress, and being converted again to little children, 
that they might read over in the light of His spirit 
the great truths which descend from above, and are 
pure and peaceable. 

The Psalmist seems to me to have been reaching 
out in the right direction, as he caught up this figure 
of the olive branches as the proper metaphor for 
children. It w T ould be easy to run -the metaphor to 
excess, for it is full of meaning in various ways, 
The olive tree was the chief of the useful trees of 
Palestine. It has in it much that bears a likeness to 
the human character. It has been, in all ages, the 
tree nearest to the oriental man. It is a species that 
in that warm climate, changes its condition after the 
first two or three years, something as man does from 
youth to manhood. It runs up its early shoots with 
vigorousness and rapidity, in long lithe half succu- 
lent saplings, that distance the softer woods. Its 
first period gives no sign of the second. It is soft, 
easily hurt, bending to the finger, and rushing on 



EBV CATION OF HOME. 219 

with an exuberance of force, fresh, shining, smooth 
and brightly green. Then come other conditions, 
slower, harder, slowly developing, working in secret 
its hard and enduring fibre, till the older tree stands 
by the road side, gray-green, dusty, gnarled and tough, 
rough with many a broken spinous growth, and 
apparently perpetual. A few old stumpy, solitary 
patriarchs, with their stems soaked with oil, are be- 
lieved to be still existing, where eighteen centuries 
ago, the Paschal moon looked through them to light 
the sorrow of the Son of Man. The Scriptures con- 
stantly seek in the olive, the similitudes of our hu- 
man affairs. But the one meaning of it almost 
always comes uppermost, that it is a symbol of peace 
between man and his Maker. 

It was the leaf of this tree, which, brought in the 
mouth of the dove to the prisoners in the ark, told 
them that a new world was emerging out of the old, 
to be their home, under new conditions. The old and 
evil world of the races who had forgotten God was 
swept away. From the four homes set up by those 
who came out of the ark, the world was again to become 
populous, with a better race. In all the nations that 
descended from them, this plant became dear to them 
with substantial benefits and religious associations. It 
told of fertility, of the great blessing of water, of 
prosperity and plenty, and of mercy and religious 
peace. What the rainbow afterwards was in the sky, 
the olive tree was on the ground, the symbol of cov- 
enant and religious obligation. Solomon constructed 



220 TEE CEUECE OF TEE HOUSEHOLD. 



certain portions of the temple of this wood, evidently 
with an eye to its moral significance. And under its 
shade at last the great passion of our Redemption was 
wrought out by the Redeemer of men. David has 
once likened the sainted state to the " olive tree 
planted in the courts of the house of God ; " and in 
the same spirit, here pronounces the blessing of the 
man who feareth the Lord, that he shall eat the labor 
of his hands ; his wife, like the fruitful vine by the walls 
of his house, and his u children like olive branches 
round about his table." 

Two thoughts come into my own mind, in this con- 
nection, and I present them for your consideration. 

I. That children are to be religiously considered, 
and educated in the faith that they are a gift that 
cometh of the Lord. 

II. That the dangers that beset them are to be 
best guarded against by such a mode of care. 

L We are in the way of hearing an immense 
amount of exhortation, to have faith. Faith is, in 
some sides of it, the one want of the age. The 
clergy are calling for religious faith in the various 
creeds of the many sects into which they are divided. 
Now, in some respects, the want is real. There are 
faiths that are essential to life, whether here or in 
any other world that we can conceive of as before 
us. But there are faiths, also, which we need not 
suffer to live at any great cost of labor or feeling. 
Men are too busy in keeping life in the latter class 
of beliefs, to notice or preserve the vitality of the 



EDUCATION OF HOME. 



221 



former class. Now, as I read the Bible, if there is 
one vital characteristic about the gospel of Christ as 
to the land of faith that is essential to true life be- 
fore God, it is that which cometh unto man, not 
from without y but from within. The era in which 
we are placed is emphatically that of the Spirit. " It 
is expedient for you that I go away, . . . that the Spirit 
may come unto you." If Christ could not stay, and 
teach the forms of doctrine by the hearing of the ear, 
but must, in the order of Divine Providence, give way 
to the new mode of communicating vital truth, direct- 
ly by the spirit of God, then the wisdom that cometh 
down from heaven is the wisdom that is vital. I know 
that the Quakers have run this to an extreme. And 
it is the supreme of folly to say it, and in the next 
breath to claim that it communicates the element of 
infallibility to the teacher, who himself violates it in 
the act of offering to teach. But I go this far : the 
faith that we need is faith in those elements of charac- 
ter which come to us in the relations of life, in truth 
of conduct, in honesty, in God-fearingness cultivated 
at the mother's knee, in the balance and poise of the 
whole man, such as the Catechism of this Church 
means to demand, and I believe can accomplish, or 
I would not serve her. In other words : I believe that 
the spirit of God will communicate to a true man, who 
has been educated in the fear of the Lord in a Chris- 
tian home, the infallibility that he needs, and the only 
infallibility that he does need, the instinct to do right : 
the poise of character which will make him a real man, 



CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



give him the impeti of a real man. He may err in 
the harmonies of metaphysicians : he may not always 
be reducible to rules : he may be troublesome, as was 
his Lord, to the communities of earth ; but if he look to 
have the wisdom which he needs, not to make him a 
teacher of others, but an actor on the stage of time, 
to lay up a foundation of truth of feeling, that shall ht 
a rock of defence to him, he will have it. 

Now this wisdom and this faith, namely, this uncon- 
scious bone and fibre, meat and muscle portion of 
character, it is the work of home to accomplish. And 
it can ordinarily accomplish it only as we regard it 
as the religious work of home primarily to do it. If 
we unfortunately turn it over to the sect, or leave it 
to the Sunday-school ; if we adopt the notion that 
it can be safely left to the changes of manhood, 
and accept the theory of the prodigal son as the 
model of Christian experience, then we take from 
home its divine meanings and transfer them to those 
who have no such commission. The seeds of char- 
acter are laid up in the fallow soil before the spring 
days are over. The future man and woman are 
moulded morally long before they are out of your 
leading strings. In the college in which they grad- 
uated, you are faculty and trustees, by a divine right. 
God gave the first promise to the command to 
honor parents. That promise was a home in the 
land of Canaan, and long life to enjoy it; yea, and 
it had in it the song of a life forever and ever. And 
God gave it thus, because the relation of you and 



EDUCATION OF HOME. 



223 



them and that life here and hereafter is intrinsic, is 
the norm of society : is the law of moral gravitation ; 
is the spiritual magnetism, in the power of which His 
will can be read and fulfilled. If I bring you a clerk, 
and say to you, " This young man has been an idle 
fellow and a thief ; he has been brought up in the 
prisons of the city ; he has been in every kind of 
pickle; but he has reformed. He is a true believer; 
he talks beautifully on the sin of dishonesty, and has 
an amount of the wisdom of experience, that is rarely 
acquired/' Would you undertake him ? Not as a 
clerk. But they are building churches out of him all 
the time, and wondering, when he fails to be as good 
as he knows how to be, e diverso, from his acquaintance 
with the evil of society. Now it is possible that he 
might be finally honest, and it is possible that the 
purest training may fail. But all men recognize that 
this is the law of exception and the reserve of the 
free will in which God created us. My opinion is 
that we need only to look at this thing, and dare to 
accept the conclusions of the reason. They are the 
inferences as well of inspiration ; that home is the 
seat of the truth of character, and the" fountain from 
which the State and the Church must draw their 
strength. The olive-branches round the table, are 
olive-branches, or signs of covenant. Let them grow 
in the nursery of home, with the assurance of the 
provisions of the love of the God who gave them. 
The rite of infant baptism, as it is practised among 
us in this Church, is, as you know, displeasing 



224 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



to the majority of sectarians. Some would reject it 
altogether, and many repudiate it as having the 
element of the new birth concealed in its sacred 
waters. But it, and the doctrine of it, are a protest 
against the falsehoods of the day. It asserts the 
sacredness of home. It gives to the mother the con- 
viction that she is a priestess of the spiritual temple ; 
that she has been to the altar and. offered for her 
purification, and taken home to her bosom, the infant 
whom religion has consecrated as a trust ■ of the 
Saviour of men. Her olive-branch is planted by 
her in the courts of the house of God. Hers, and no 
less his. We all believe two things. t, That we 
are born in sin ; and 2, That a merciful God must 
accept us by some right of his religion, that we may 
not grow up into its fatal inheritance ; and we must 
consecrate our homes, and harmonize them with the 
religion of our souls, or both will suffer. 

II. The dangers that beset our children are best 
guarded against, by a religious estimation of them. 
The word religion is used in the Bible only once, and 
then it means something else. That once, it trans- 
lates, Judaismos : or the Jewish system of life and doc- 
trine. In all other cases, the book, which is taken 
up with almost nothing else, always looks at the 
results of the unmentioned secret character of the 
man. In the first Testament, the synonyme is right- 
eousness, that is, obedience to law. In the last, it is 
divided between faith and love, because the law now 
is the life of Christ. Now, in the first case, if we are 



EDUCATION OF ROME. 



225 



Jews ; then the duty is plain, that the infant life of 
the family is just as truly religious as the adult life. 
In the home of an Israelite, the boy who is born into 
it is by the express care of the highest authority 
interlaced with all the promises. He is to be circum- 
cised the eighth day, because God accepted Abraham, 
and did it because he saw that Abraham would build 
his system of religious thought on the fidelities of the 
father. 

Now, if we are Christians, are we worse off than 
the Israelites ? Or did God, after founding the first 
covenant on the example of Abraham, then go back 
and rob it of its meaning, in the New Covenant ? 
Now then, taking the chances, if I may be allowed to 
say so: taking the two modes of thought about your 
children: one, of the Anabaptists, that there is no 
place for them in the spiritual fold, and no sense or 
use in their baptism : and the other, that of the 
Catholic world, that they are equally the care of 
Christ, with the whole bench of Bishops, and have 
fewer sins to confess, not being adults ; I claim that 
if it be a calculation of probabilities only, it is the 
plain fact, that the safest thing is to train them up in 
the nurture and admonition of the Lord, just as if we 
believed that they could be acceptable to the Creator. 
True, they cannot talk doctrine : though I notice 
by the paper, that an infant of eight years, who re- 
ports that she experienced religion at two years, is 
just now engaged in explaining her emotions and 
spiritual struggles in children's prayer meetings over 
15 



226 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the river: but ordinarily, the infant is not graduated 
into doctrinal consistency. They are not religious 
by believing in faith, or in platforms of this and that 
faith ; or if so, God help- us here, where no two men 
believe anything alike. But they are religious by 
believing in God directly, so unmistakably, that they 
do not doubt of it. The eye does not see, by seeing 
the air, or the water in the air. When it sees the 
most of the water in the air, it sees the least of the 
celestial luminaries, for they disappear in the fog 
and rain. Now a young olive sprout can develope 
sap, just as surely as an old tree. It does not de- 
velope the same sort of oily sap as the oldster. It is 
better it should not. It is not asked to. But it can 
do its work in its way just as truly as the other. 

Now I claim that the Bible recognizes this distinc- 
tion in men. The glory of a young man is— not his 

wisdom, or his views of the rationale of society but 

his strength. " I write unto young men, because ye 
are strong." The glory of the gray head is wisdom 
at the need of others ; of the young man, silence and 
modesty. So there is a place for our children in the 
courts of the house of God. They are with us always. 
Put it thus. Suppose a mother, and her infant of 
two months, to die together suddenly by an accident. 
Does any one doubt that they go together into 
Paradise ? If so, then, unless when the child begins 
to talk, an angel comes and wipes off God's mark 
from it, it is always with us. 

It is here that I would leave the matter, that the 



EDUCATION OF HOME. 



227 



education of home teach this one fact, until it cannot 
be misunderstood ; till all the children feel that the 
whole man is appealed to, and as in after years, so 
from the beginning, they are religious beings, and 
always in covenant with God ; through their homes 
first, and then, and in the same line, through their 
Church. If any people dare to make this real in 
daily life, they must expect the opposition of many 
doctrinal oracles ; and the blessing of God, in finding 
that his promise is true, that their children will be 
like olive-branches round their tables, whispering of 
strength and of peace with a covenant-keeping God. 



XIV. 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 

" And ye masters , do the same things unto them , forbearing threaten- 
ing : knowing that your master also is in heaven ; neither is there 
respect of persons with him" — Ephes. vi. 9. 

OME read this text : " Knowing that your 
master and theirs is in heaven ; " which is 
certainly so, whether it is put in by St. Paul 
or not. In other words, the duties of mas- 
ters of servants or employees of all descriptions, are 
to be regulated by the consciousness of the superior, 
that he is to give an account of his trust at last, to 
one who will take no note of our earthly sophistries, 
nor be deluded by any inconsistency of faculty, in 
the giving to all the final adjustments of exact justice. 
This precept of the apostle is conceived in the spirit 
of a grand and universal justice. It is intrinsically 
inspired; that is, it is moulded by that wisdom 
which the man Paul, except as he drew it from the 
Old Testament scriptures modified by the spirit of 
Christ, certainly could not have framed it as he has 
done out of any earthly code of domestic morals. 
In the ages of the past it has been always the 




THE DUTIES OF MASTEBS. 



Magna Charta of the oppressed. It has modified 
their condition, and disarmed the severities of their 
task-masters. It has given life to the efforts of re- 
formers, and lent its vigor to their sermons, as they 
took the side of the weak against the strong. When 
it was written, it was not the decision of the wisdom 
of the world. It was by no means the teaching of 
the laws of the pagan nations of the world. The 
Roman and Greek laws placed the slave under the 
absolute control of the owner, as it placed the cattle. 
The Lord of the household was authorized to slay 
the servant, if in his judgment the crime required 
it. And the laws of Moses in this regard partook 
more of the ancient than of the modern spirit. They 
were harsh, at the best. It was only a slow process, 
that changed the old severity, and after innumerable 
struggles, step by step, and often with a step in the 
rear, at last established the present ideas of human 
rights. It could hardly have been otherwise. The 
ancient custom of enslaving enemies — and often the 
only choice seemed to lie between slaying or enslav- 
ing them — made it necessary to endow the enslaver 
with the power of life and death. The African race 
are the last to suffer from slavery. They are docile, 
and on the whole patient in servitude. The disad- 
vantages of it are not so prominent in their cases, 
because of their virtues and vices. Slavery re- 
strained them from some of the latter, and the former 
inclined them to endurance of its hardships. But 
when men of the other races were enslaved by the 



2$Q THE GHUEGH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



accidents of war, it was often like capturing tigers 
and leopards ; the slave was unhappy, and the 
subjugator not to be envied. Add to this fact the 
great pride of race of the Jew, and you will agree 
with me, that the precept of this " Hebrew of the 
Hebrews " was either a happy accident of his pen, or 
it came from that providence which has made itself 
prominent in the progress of the human race from 
the beginning. Note how skilfully it is worded. 
He begins with laying down the duty of the dou/ous, 
L e., the slaves. 

The Bishop of Lincoln, an Englishman, and in no 
way inclined to indulgence of slavery, thus comments 
on this Word: " Slaves, or bondmen — not to be 
confounded in their condition with the household ser- 
vants of Christian nations in later days, who have 
been raised by the gospel from the condition of 
douloi to that of freemen and brethren in Christ. ,, 
And another English commentator remarks : " The 
apostle does not interfere with any established rela- 
tions, however morally and politically wrong, but 
only enjoins the discharge of duties which the very 
persons themselves recognized." A Jew never 
would have enjoined them : and an enthusiast would 
not have recognized the relations. 

He tells the slaves their duties. The masters liked 
that The slaves being inferior, could not well have 
objected to it. But on those duties which both ac- 
knowledged as belonging to the political state, he 
grafted, by a turn of the pen, the great precept of 



THE DUTIES OF MASTER 



exact justice on the Christian scheme of faith. ' Slaves, 
obey your masters, not by compulsion, not on the 
minimum of a jealous eye-service, not as you must : 
but freely, as to Christ : knowing that all good life 
belongs to the Lord to notice and reward : and mas- 
ters, do the same things to them, and on the same 
principle ; moderating threatening, knowing that ye 
have a Master in heaven, whose eye is single, and 
whose compensations are infallible/ Their tempta- 
tion is that of eye-service, the sins of the weak, to 
dodge and shirk, to sneak and become careless of 
the master's property, to fawn and flatter, and thus 
deceive and cheat ; to waste and idle, and degenerate 
as laborers, and degrade themselves as Christians, 
and become the source of incessant vexation to them- 
selves and to all about them. The temptation of the 
master is revealed in the words — forbearing threat- 
ening," or " moderating it" As the margin reads, as 
if it could not be altogether forborne, but only re- 
strained. As some years ago it was claimed on the 
sea, that a captain of sailing vessels could not man- 
age a ship in a storm without swearing at the sailors, 
so it would have been found among the morals of a 
slave-planting code, that it was impossible to make a 
crop, without threatening. And why should it not 
be true, however bad the threatening may be ? For 
if you cut the nerve of honest labor, and change a 
man into a mere machine or drudge, to have no per- 
sonal interest in the results of his toil, why should he 
care for the honorable motives of the industrious 



232 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



freeman ? Pervert the manhood of any one, and you 
must appeal to the animal motives in him. He 
must be made to work ; and if you cannot trust to 
his generous motives for it, you must feel the tempta- 
tion to descend to the lower motives; the inferior 
police of the threat ; and then to make the threat last 
to the scourge and the prison. Threatening is not 
wrong in itself. The namby-pamby Christianity 
which offers to rule the affairs of men by the code of 
Eli, whose ineffectual : " Nay, my sons/' when it 
was his duty to have put them to death,, but what he 
would have stopped their crimes, is as false to nature 
as it is a travesty of the spirit of Christ. But the 
habit of threatening as the one motive power of a 
home, is the confession of weakness and folly ; and 
the gate through which many an evil and curse will 
creep in. Take two families as an illustration. In 
one the parent appeals, as a rule, to the reason of the 
children, and complements their undeveloped reason 
by a wise and vigorous discipline, on occasion ; just 
as he trusts their bodies generally to the dictates of 
healthy food and right exercise, and administers medi- 
cine prudently, when for any cause it is required. 
Take another, where the parent vibrates between the 
Eli-croak of " nay, my sons," and the equally im- 
potent threatening of a petty tyranny. Why do you 
wonder if children do not grow amiable or lovely 
under this latter sort of training. It is like giving 
them candy and medicine for food, and grieving 
that they are sickly. 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 233 



But my thought, to-day, is of the servants of our 
homes, and our duty towards them. I love the spirit 
of this text, and need not go beyond it for my 
theme. 

I. It is a Christian relation. Conscience, a future 
judgment, come into it. It is not a matter of mere 
dollars and cents. It is not to be had for money in 
its true blessing to any of us. There are exceptions 
I kno.w, where the employer is intent only on the 
money value of the service ; where a master imagines 
that when he has paid the bill, he has discharged the 
whole task; and when the servant rises to the spirit 
of St. Paul, and nobly carries off the prize of Chris- 
tian charity, and graces an ungracious contract with 
the touch of service done "as unto the Lord." But 
the law of compensation usually comes into pl ay 
sooner or later, in every thing. You buy a human 
helper, as you would a horse, and you will sooner or 
later find those who contract with you on your own 
level. They return you mule-labor for your wages 
With what measure ye mete, it is always belno- 
measured to you again. Let me say here that I do 
not think that all men are equal, by any means, ex- 
cept as to the rights before the courts, both here 
and in eternity. I believe in strong distinctions ; and 
in usages to express them. Grant a man all his 
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ■ 
then grant that before God there is no respect of 
persons; then, after all that, comes in the large 
margin of distinctions, that are just as true and valid 



234 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



as the most spiritual facts of the Creed. " One star 
differeth from another star in glory : so also is it in 
the resurrection of the dead;" and no less so is it, 
before that time. There is no such thing as equality. 
It is not in nature. No two spears of grass are ex- 
actly alike. No two birds are the same. There are 
aristocrats among the very sparrows, who chirp de- 
fiance at the birds of low degree ' who offer to 
domesticate themselves near them. Grant that 
before God there is no distinction of persons. Before 
us there are — we are not God, and before us there 
must be. None administer His judgment. Yea ! 
in the most democratic town of republican New- 
England, and in the families of the most benevolent 
deacon of Congregationalism, which is the garrulous 
foster-mother of human rights, I will find you 
characters, whose virtues are built on a personal and 
family pride, as evident and accepted as that of the 
old French nobility. I claim a strong distinction be- 
tween master and servant. There are ranks of order. 
The servant in the kitchen, or the porter down the 
cellar, has not your tastes and opportunites. He may 
be a better man than you are, and in the realities of 
character, he may be more of a gentleman. The 
man who rules two hundred men has chances of 
development beyond any one of the two hundred. 
The officer has a daily education in the higher uses 
of faculty, than his soldiers or his sailors. Your maid 
may have the refinements of a purer nature than you 
have, and the more delicate undeveloped tastes of a: 



TEE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 235 



lady. That is all the worse for you. She ought not 
to have them. It is your loss that she does. You 
have two ways to meet her; one, to copy her, on 
the sly, and try to excite her delicacy for your igno- 
rance of the purer rights of your relation, till you at 
least equal her ; or you are compelled to make the 
money relation tell to the utmost, as long as you can 
But ordinarily, I take it that they who have the 
duties of the harder menial work of the family, are 
not the chiefs and examples in it of delicacy and re- 
finement; and that any theory that is built on such a 
sophism is false and dangerous. My experience is that 
success, as a rule, follows work in the right direction 
Lotteries disturb the balance of trade very slightly 
in this country. Sundry sudden fortunes and hap- 
py chances cannot blind us to the fact that work and 
money, and leisure and education, are usually to each 
other as cause and effect. The possession of money 
implies the presence of servants to do the coarser 
kinds of labor. The man who is industrious and 
rises above the coarser necessity, has more time and 
the same industry to do better things, and to im- 
prove his tastes and manners ; and he has a right to 
it; and so he has a right ordinarily to the honor 
which it brings with thinking men. This will seem 
offensive to some, perhaps. It is none the less true. 
It is necessary to say it, for it is the loss of this solid 
conviction that has invaded and damaged our peace 
in our families, more than any one other thing. 
Either the mistress attempts to yield to her maids, 



236 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



and not assert herself, as mistress, by right of her 
position and superior womanhood ; or she tries the 
doubtful game of putting them down, resenting their 
impertinence and checking their bolder ways, till 
change and rebellion are the order of the household. 
The servant rules the mistress, and the disorder 
travels upward through the members, till the whole 
head is sick and the whole heart faint ; and a hotel 
seems to be the only Zoar out of the domestic 
Sodom. Part of the evil belongs to the times : to 
the crude notions of what is true liberty, and part to 
the cheapness of lands ^about us. In a new country, 
where land is cheap, the wages of labor must be 
high. But that is not all. We bid to people to ac- 
cept charity, rather than work, and so part of it is 
due to the frightful fact, that in Brooklyn we made 
forty thousand paupers last year, to become the ready 
material of some future mob, at no distant day either. 
Ten thousand families were helped last winter by the 
public charities of this city — I take it from documents — 
to say nothing of those who were restrained by pride 
to confine their appeals to private citizens. And 
that in a city where domestic labor is paid at a 
higher rate than in any other country in the world. 
I take it for granted that ten thousand of them might 
have been employed at reasonable wages, and the 
care of the rest made tolerable by that one reduction 
of our expenditures. We provide hot-houses for 
our own troubles. We err on both sides, in giving 
to encourage idleness; and then, in cutting off the 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 



classes who are virtuous enough to work for us, from 
our sympathies. The time has come that the charity 
question has to be reconsidered, because of the 
evils it is bringing on us all as citizens. 

But with that I am not now dealing. I hold it a 
sound remark to be insisted on, that the servanthood 
of your families is not to be looked at as a matter of 
money merely. You cannot buy it. It is some- 
thing better than gold or silver can compass. It is 
not to be left in the mind of the servant girl for a 
moment that you value her at fifteen dollars a 
month, and no more. Look at it. A girl of sixteen 
lands here from Ireland or Germany. She has been 
the victim of proud kings and bigotted priests, you 
may say. It is all stuff. She is a girl, and is no 
victim. What does she know or care for all that ? 
She has been the child of honest poor parentage, of 
simple hard-working people, rude, but honest. She 
has had a home of the poorest thatch and scantiest 
food. She is willing to work. You employ her, 
just as you would a horse or a sewing machine. She 
is of another religion from yours. By the way, there 
is only one religion in a true home. There is only 
one religion spoken of in the Greek Testament. 
There are forms and sects enough, but there is 
only one piety. She is a Romanist in every fibre of 
her girl nature; she believes every word that the 
priest tells her, and generally she is fortunate, in her 
lonely kitchen, left to her ignorance, that she does ; 
for Protestantism hardly goes on missions into our 



238 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



kitchens. That is quite too low worlc It never 
tells in the papers. It makes no annual reports. It 
pays no agents. You buy her labor, and cut her 
off from all sympathy. Perhaps the baby or younger 
child steals down into her department and wakes in 
her girl heart the old feelings, which she once knew 
before she touched the shores of the " land of the 
free and the home of the brave." Her religion is 
always spoken of scornfully, and she must keep 
silent. She is made to feel that there is between 
her and you ' a gulf fixed- and no angel or saint ever 
can cross it, to carry her a cup of cold water in the 
name of a disciple. Possibly her wages are grudg- 
ingly paid: wages that perhaps are sent across the 
waters by her, to the shieling at home, to keep life 
in an old father or mother, or to allow some other 
one of the family to come and see how these Chris- 
tians here love one another. Do you say that this 
is a hard picture? I answer that I wish it were not 
every word true to life. We have been often thrilled 
by the eloquence of the men who told of the horrors 
of buying black beings. We detest the merchandise 
of girls in marriage, sold for money at the altar. But 
who thinks it worth his while to avenge the wrongs 
of the kitchen girls? And then, when they are 
driven by cold neglect to turn and assert their wo- 
manhood against such tyranny, there rises the 
shriek of ingratitude. 

The Irish are said to be ungrateful. I do not 
believe a word of it. It is a libel on the bravest and 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 



kindliest race of the English speaking tongue on 
the earth. Like all the Celtic and Gaelic nations, 
they are as mobile, sensitive and inflammatory as the 
Galatians before them. They are extremists, and 
often blunderers, but they are easily led by their 
affections, and are. open and ready to the strongest 
friendships, and capable of the grandest self-denials. 
Before we substantiate the charge of ingratitude 
against them, let us take note of what they are to be 
grateful for. Who can be grateful to be bought for 
so much a month, and reminded of it at every turn, 
day and night ? Who is to be held recreant at the 
bar of human tenderness, if they are cognizant of no 
family tie, under your roof? All duties are in a 
measure relative; both sides must conspire. I take 
it as a thing that cannot be disputed, that in all 
these relations of our homes, the human nature in us 
will and does make itself felt. We theorize religiously 
and politically, and think that the world moves on 
the " spinning grooves " of the theory. It does not. 
The tides of common life run on below our fine 
machinery ; and those tides feel the influences of the 
luminaries far over our heads. In my own family, 
for example, the first visible influence of the procla- 
mation of freedom to the slaves of the South, was the 
intense disgust of our dear old black nurse, that any 
one should think that she had anything to do with 
being free. Neither she nor any of the family 
admitted any power on earth to touch the sacred tie 
that bound us together. We may call over the 



240 THE CHUHOH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

names of things as. we will. The facts are the 
powers, not the names. If the girl who works for 
you, is left to feel that she is cut off from your family 
life, by the circumstance of her religion, her Celtic 
blood and the humbleness of her toil, and is valued 
as just so much wages, and is kept by you merely 
as a convenience, you may thank her religion and 
her race that she is as good to you as she is. I 
would not be, either by my religion or race. 

Suppose we try the other plan. She is a member 
of your family life. If you have children, she is 
destined to affect them. It may be for good and it 
can be for great evil. In some things she and the 
children are on a level : she gets at them, in some 
things more than you. What hungry schoolboy, 
but cultivates the cook? She has a right to be 
acknowledged as a member of the family. She 
takes a share of its life. She is under its roof, and 
takes her share in its dangers of sickness or unhappy 
accident. There are duties to her that you cannot 
shirk. The first of these is friendliness, sympathy 
and culture. She is ignorant ; think for her. She 
is prejudiced. Prevent them. 

There is a poor woman in Fleet Alley. You go to 
her and sympathize in her troubles — why not with 
her ? We complain of the influence of the priests. 
It grows less and less over men all the time, because 
they can assert themselves, and make friends outside, 
and need it less than they did in the old world. It 
grows stronger over women, only because they are 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 241 



left unaided by the sympathy of their fellows. The 
misery of the Roman Church in this country is that 
there is so little use for priests in practical things. 
In the old countries it is different. There they are 
the friends of the oppressed. Here that class fails to 
appear. When the oppression is lifted, the need so 
far ceases. Again, let their religious notions alone. 
You have not had the forming of these notions. 
You cannot root out these notions half so well by 
reasoning as by example. In my judgment the 
time has about come to check this blind abuse of 
any class of our fellow citizens, because of their old- 
world ideas. It is largely the result of old-world 
policies, with which we have just nothing to do. 
There are thousands of unprotected Irish girls, who 
owe their virtues as good daughters and virtuous 
women to this old-time training, who could not 
change without rooting up much of the wheat of 
character with the tares. 

If all the priests of Brooklyn should come to us 
to-morrow, and say : " We are going back to Italy, 
and we leave you the care of these members of our 
flocks, to keep them where we leave them. ,, For 
one, I should be sadly troubled as to what to do with 
them. Men talk of changing religions as one changes 
a garment. It is not so. Any religiousness that 
amounts to much is not so easily laid aside. The 
Church a man follows may be wrong. What is the 
virtue one has gained by it ? Oatmeal is very indif- 
ferent food ; but it makes a braw man of a Scotchman. 
16 



242 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



For one doubtful advice that a priest gives to a ser- 
vant, it is inevitable, if he has common sense and 
decency, that he must give her a dozen that are 
reasonable and helpful. 

We may feel often that it could be done better, 
but it is doubtful if we could do it. There are disad- 
vantages, it may be, in the present system, but the 
question is for us, do we make the best of it ? Do 
we treat those who serve us constantly, as human 
with us ; as members of the same Christ, and going 
up with us to give evidence at the bar of God of our 
common home-life ? The piety which shines brighter 
in the eyes of the maid-servant or the porter than it 
may in the columns of the advertising sheet, is, in 
my judgment, the truest orthodoxy and the soundest 
Protestanism. I cannot, for the life of me, believe 
that the book which has in it the Epistle of St. James, 
leaves any reasonable doubt on that subject. I know 
a man who, giving an order to a number of Irish 
navvies, to go down into a pit filled with mephitic 
gas, found that they were afraid to do it. He said 
at once, " I do not give you an order to do what I 
am afraid to do." He was drawn three times out of 
the pit in an exhausted state, before the object was 
gained ; but all those men believed in him, from that 
time, as much as I do. There is probably more of 
the disgust at manual labor prevalent just now in the 
minds of the rising generation than there has been 
heretofore, — a sense that the true lady must not soil 
her dainty hands with the offices of the menial. It 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 



243 



is a bad sign. It is a dangerous sign. It is unpatri- 
otic. We may swell the air with the songs of the 
country, and point to the mechanical triumphs of the 
past century in vain, if the spirit of our ancestors is 
wanting. The woman who cannot take hold and 
keep the household moving in an even groove, 
because she is afraid of sacrificing her delicacy, is fit 
to be the wife of the defaulter, and the mother of 
pettifoggers. Often the man's sin appears flagrant 
before the public. But the woman's sin and ineffi- 
ciency are the real causes of it. He stole, that she 
might keep up her style. 

Finally, then, to bring these remarks to an end : 
let us, in the home, assert the inequality of the con- 
ditions, by showing the authority of a better piety ; 
the aristocracy of superior character ; the domestic 
reign of a queenly refinement and diligence in think- 
ing for the good of all, that commands obedience by 
its intrinsic majesty. One needs only to hear a strain 
of sweet music, to recognize its claim to win on us ; 
and there is a harmony of character which no ruder 
mind is at liberty to disregard. The very heart and 
conscience of the rude will be engaged on its side. 
They will give it its power, by simply seeing and 
feeling its beauty. To disregard it will be known to be 
a sin against right and truth. It is the only authority 
worth having on earth. If Christ commanded His 
most excellent followers to set their ambition on be- 
ing the servants of the Christian household, it is 
surely not too much to expect of private homes, 



244 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



that they honor labor with their sympathy, and not 
despise those who are the servants of all. If we now 
need any one advice more than another, it is this: 
that we drop this mercenary idea of servitude, that it 
is regulated only by the wages and is incapable of 
higher considerations. It would be, next, to look at 
the fundamentals of religion, and seek to increase 
them in the family. Those fundamentals are to keep 
the commandments. And those commands are to 
love one another. In this matter of home piety, I 
would write one single line of the poet Sterling's over 
the door of every servant's hall : 

" Love teacheth more than doctrine can." 

The homes which are mixed of people of the vari- 
ous sects of dogma, are undoing the evil of the sects 
all the time. We go to a church and hear a man 
demonstrate that there is only one Church, and only 
one way to get the smile of the Father of Lights. We 
swell with gratitude that we are among the select few, 
and our ways past criticism. We shiver at the terrors 
of the inquisition, and detest the shamelessness of the 
confessional. But at home, some household drudge, 
who believes in the Pope, if she knows what that 
means, and who goes to the confessional regularly, is 
faithful, kindly and honest, in spite of it. Somehow 
the thunders of the rhetorician pass by like heat 
lightning and strike nowhere. The great Church 
grows on in ways past finding out, and the little ones 
are gradually assimilated to it in spite of themselves. 



THE DUTIES OF MASTERS. 245 



The great converter is a holy life : and a holy life is 
the home life. It shines best where the outer motives 
are least in play — in the quiet scenes where the real 
heart comes out and shows itself. May God help us 
there. May he help us to do to our servants the 
same things " that we should wish them to do to us 
forbearing the threatening of a petty tyranny; remem- 
bering that they and we have a Master in heaven, in 
whose final arbitrament there is to be no respect of 
persons, and no regard for caste or class. 



XV. 



THE UNMARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 

" But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmar- 
ried, careth for the things that are of the Lord, how he may please 
the Lord : but he that is married careth for the things that are of the 
world, how he may please his wife. There is a difference between a 
wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of 
the Lord, that she may be holy, both in body and spirit ; but she that 
is married, careth for the things of the world, how she may please her 
husband."— i Cor. vfi. 32-34. 

; S long ago as the time of St. Paul, this 
difference between a married man or 
woman and an unmarried one, has been the 
legitimate subject of religious thought ; and 
however the announcement of the thought may be a 
matter of surprise, in this generation, it remains one 
of vital interest in any scheme that looks to the 
regulation of our Christian homes. Low wit and 
ungodly scoffing have made the subject suspicious to 
the handling of the pulpit. It is all the worse for the 
wit and the profane unbelief, which always serves the 
cause of evil best when it can, by any arts, frighten 
us away from subjects of importance. The cause of 
evil is the cause of the profane against the lofty ideals 
of true life. The temptation which besets a young 




THE UNMARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 24J 



man or woman lies oftener in the light laugh of the 
scornful, and the soft witticism that only hesitates a 
sneer, than in the direct attacks of the reason and 
conscience. It is so with this theme, that the unmar- 
ried are always a portion of our homes, whether they 
be male or female. They are there for good. It is 
possible to invest them with the atmosphere of 
ridicule, as the coarse world has done, or to realize 
the nobler spirit of Christianity, and confess a higher 
ideal of the divine life, which is possible to them. It 
is true that the married woman must be anxious, 
often over-anxious about the things of this world. 
Her ideal of the true and beautiful, in the sacred 
things of the spirit,, must often be contaminated by 
the rude toils of her household. She seeks to please 
her husband, and properly : but he is not one always 
whose pleasing is a healthy process for her. His 
tastes may be bad and low at the best, and the surest 
way to please him, may not be the way of the purest 
things of which she is capable. If all men were wise 
and good, then the problems of life would be simpli- 
fied. But they are not. The best of them are 
imperfect. The ideal of the highest virtue, is that of 
patience with the necessary evils of the disordered 
world. "Let patience have her perfect work," says 
the Apostle, "that ye may be perfect and entire, 
lacking nothing." The poor household drudge, who 
is letting patience have the perfecting work, may be 
conscious that the bloom is all the time being worn 
off her soul by the necessary contact with the coarse- 



248 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



ness and lowness of an unequal yoke. Her salvation 
is to be worked out through much tribulation; and 
her peace be gained in ways past understanding It 
1S always true, that in any Christian community, and 
perhaps, in communities as they become more 
Christian, that a class will be found whose duty it 
becomes, by the ordination of Providence, to stand 
out from the settled ranks of society and bear witness 
to the fact that there is such a thing as « caring for 
the things of the Lord, that one may be holy both in 
body and spirit." It may be that our own community 
has need of this class; a class that has no need of 
one peculiar dress, or set mode of speaking, to demon- 
strate to the common people the reality of the things 
that are 'of the Lord;' the pureness of life, which 
makes the eternal world real to men; the hirfi 
respect for the things lovely and of good report 
which teaches us all the reality of them. We have 
been so busy in straining all the things in the Bible 
to the destruction of the dogmas of the Roman 
Catholics, that we have given up some things which 
are a real loss. It is to the detriment of Protestant- 
ism, that it is visibly compelled to return on some of 
its tracks, and confess that it may be possible to 
protest too much, and give up, in the zeal of the 
partizan, some of the good things of the faith. The 
ideal of a chaste womanhood and a virgin manhood, 
tnat wilhngly gives itself to works of charity in the 
love of the pure and in pity to the burdened anion- 
men, 1S something which we cannot surrender, with- 



THE VX MARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 249 



out loss. Happiness is not the only end of living. 
Duty is its end as well. Work is its end as 
well. Lot looked to the plain of Sodom, " and 
lo ! it was well watered, and as the garden 
of the Lord." It was the new Eden, and so 
Lot chose it. The Lots always choose it. The race 
of the easy is prolific, and found settled in all the 
watercourses. They grow up like a green bay tree. 
Their roots are well watered. They point out their 
blessings, as the glory of gods and men. They have 
no problems of life, save to eat, drink and be merry. 
The problems of society are not for them, They 
never calculate the angle of the slippery places where 
their feet are set. They have no questionings abour 
the eye of a needle, and how much they can squeeze 
through its restricted aperture. Grant the fact of 
plenty to eat and drink, and a fair measure of peace 
by land and sea ; and what need of problems ? 
" Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many 
years/' and the announcement is the end of moral 
philosophy. 

It is just here that your Elijahs come in, and pouY 
contempt on your Sodoms and Samarias of plenty 
and ease. They show you the fires rolling below ; 
the sensuality of the corrupt heart of men : the fact 
written all over history, from Sodom and Babylon 
down to the last winter in Washington, that men are 
never so much in danger from all the evils of the 
world and the devil combined, as they are from 
themselves, when they can have all things their own 



250 TEE CHURCH OF TEE HOUSEHOLD. 



way. The race of the "Do as you likes," as Charles 
Kingsley has shown, is near of kin to the degenerate 
gorilla, and needs only some thousands of years of 
uninterrupted causation to descend visibly to their 
cousins-german. None of us can bear prosperity 
and not be injured by too much of it Whom the 
Lord loveth he chasteneth. Lot goes to Sodom, and 
the grass is green, and. the people are all for having 
the least of the problems of society, and the best times 
seem to come on him. But did you ever note the 
fact, that Lot staid there long enough to demonstrate 
that the defilements of the pleasure-loving Sodomites 
had penetrated into his entire family, and condemned 
them to ever-censured infamy. Meanwhile Abraham, 
with an inextinguishable hunger in his heart, is wan- 
dering around the wadies of the hills. Pasturage is 
scanty, never more than enough. But the air is pure, 
and visions of the day of Christ frame themselves in 
the heavens over him, and he is seen declaring, by 
what he did, that he sought a country, and if he had 
been mindful of that one from whence he came out, 
he might have returned. But he did not return, and 
somehow, you and I are glad that he did not. We 
catch from him a vision of a city that hath founda- 
tions, and is not Lot's unhappy city, that had none. 
So, and in this line of thought, I propose to do you 
what good I may. I claim that there are duties in 
the Christian Church and the Christian home, that 
make it a legitimate subject of the pulpit to insist on 
them. There are visions that can be wrought out in 



THE UNMARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 251 



the sacred retreats of home by the unmarried mem- 
bers of our families, which may be fraught with 
doctrines and duties to all. 

It is singular that in all the ancient cities of Pagan 
Europe, an image of a virgin was the palladium of 
the national safety. Troy could not fall till the image 
of Pallas had been stolen by Ulysses and Diomedes. 
And imperial Rome fell only when corruption had 
levelled her virtues in the mire, and the vestal fire 
had died out of the hearts of her sons. So in the 
ages of the Christian amelioration of men, the same 
law holds. Half the moulding influences of the 
darker ages have taken shape from the feminine story 
of the virgin-mother of Jesus. Gradually the power 
of the maternal love seemed to push out the love of 
the father of Christ, and men learned to give her the 
first throne, in a quaternion of divinities. When I 
stated, in good faith, that in these sermons about 
Christian homes, I had something to say on this 
theme, I could feel the delicate start, as if it were too 
dangerous ground for comment It remains to be 
seen, if it is or no. 

I. The text recognizes two things : that there are 
these classes : and that there is work for all in the 
great scheme of the Church of God. 

Now it is singular, that this instinct for idealizing 
the virgin life, appears everywhere, except in the Old 
Testament. It was an outside influence among the 
Jews altogether. The record of Naomi and Ruth 
was quite in their way of thought. Their prophets,. 



252 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



who denied themselves everything of ordinary ease, 
were not unmarried by rule. This was due to the 
one promise, of a Messiah to be born of their blood. 
The sad romantic story of the daughter of Jephthah, 
was never idealized by their sages or poets. And 
their toleration of polygamy deprived them of the 
tendency to romance, which their Pagan neighbors 
manifested so freely. Therefore when the Christian 
religion came, forbidding polygamy and restoring 
the relations of home-life to their natural condition, it 
became the necessity of the times that the Apostles 
must testify to the law of the Christian Church on 
this matter. St. Paul did it in few and simple terms. 
They suited his age, as rules of conduct. They were 
afterwards perverted by the superstition of men. And 
they needed the revision of the Protestant reforma- 
tion, to rid us of the ill effects of that superstition. 
In Corinth, the city of the great central road of 
mercantile business of the world, where the religions 
of the world met on common ground, and were valued 
more as practical than as theoretical, the marriage 
relation became the subject of discussion. He made 
it the theme of this Epistle, and left it on the soundest 
basis for all time. Men realizing as the fact of every 
day, that life is uncertain and subject to changes and 
shocks, without regard to the moral fitness of things, 
could estimate his zeal for the great idea of the Gos- 
pel, that all men should use the world as not abusing 
it : that the zealous believer in things eternal should 
learn to look through the things of the passing day 



THE UNMARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 



as after all unreal, in the light of eternity. He told 
them circumcision is nothing, and yet to a Jew 
circumcision was the test rite of his national 
life; and uncircumcision was nothing, but the 
keeping of the commandments of God. Let eveiy 
man abide in the calling or condition in which he 
was called: if a servant, then Christ's freedman: 
if free, then Christ's servant, bought with the in- 
estimable price of a love that made all manner of 
self-denial an easy duty. Then with a reserve, 
which he makes emphatic, he expressly rejects any 
claim to inspiration in the matter, and gives his 
advice. It is emphatic, as advice, but, if we believe 
him, it is not the commandment of God. What was 
it? It was good for the present necessity, that is, 
the pressure of the persecutions of the prevalent 
religions of the ungodly world, that all men and 
women should, as far as possible, remain in the state 
of life in which they were made Christians. This advice 
was eminently sound and practical. More than that, 
it was merciful and Christian. It neither recom- 
mends celibacy nor condemns it. He speaks ad rem, 
to the times. Change the times, and the advice fails, 
save by way of instance and precedent. In the 
course of his remarks he states one principle, which 
is always true. It is as true if marriage were the law 
of the Church and State, as it is if it should be 
depraved by monkish rulers and ascetics. The mar- 
ried must expect to be more or less engrossed in the 
cares of their families, and so far chained down to 



254 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the sterner realities of passing life. On the opposite 
side, the unmarried have opportunity, and with duty, 
to be mindful of the things of the Lord. I say, the 
recognition of this fact is eminently the gist of this 
text. But unfortunately the history of the Church 
has been the record of the infirmity of men. What 
was for some ages the sound advice of the Apostle, 
in time became the iron law of sacerdotal monarchy. 
Then, in turn, our reformers have been always in- 
clined to go to the farthest extreme, and reject one 
of the true powers of the Church. It is only in this 
age, that such men as Pastor Fliedner in Germany, 
and others of less note, in other nations, have begun 
to insist on some recognition of the fact, that there 
are great power's for good, in utilizing the forces of 
the unmarried. True, so far, this has been mainly 
done in the interest of works of charity and education. 
But it cannot be stayed on any one line of action. 
It is only necessary once to fight out the old Refor- 
mation prejudices, which were well enough, or at 
least excusable for their times, and women in single 
life will, in their own way, re-assert themselves in the 
ideal bride of Christ. It is as true now as ever, that 
what has been, is that that will be. There is nothing 
new under the sun ; and in human nature, nothing 
instinctive to it, ever perishes. "The unmarried 
woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she 
may be holy, both in body and in spirit.^ " Aye/' says 
the monk, " in bod}', therefore the estate of marriage 
is relatively unclean, and incompatible with" the 



THE UNMARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 25$ 



highest Christian life." St Paul does not say any- 
thing of the sort He is not open to any such in- 
ference. He asserts in another place the contrary. 
But there is an opportunity given to the virgin soul, 
that it may claim these words of this Apostle as of 
importance to itself. 

L By freedom from care. The text points it out. 
There is the absence of " the cares for the things of 
the world." I hesitate not to say, that the degene- 
racy of theological learning now, is largely due to the 
fact, that the spirit of the learned universities of the 
ages past is lost The fountains of true learning in 
matters of progress in society ; the steady working 
out of the greater questions of the ages, always 
require a large body of men, who are strangers to 
the cares and the oppositions of the busy world. In 
these things, we are living from hand to mouth. I 
grant that there are geniuses who can dispense 
with the common rules of little men; but heaven 
save us from a civilization, where such geniuses shall 
be the rule. Milton may draw with the finger of the 
highest art the scene of Eden, and steal away our 
hearts with the music of the innocent love of that 
first perfect pair. But Milton was a better poet than 
a husband. He raved on the subject of his unhappy 
wife, like a blind Samson at his Delilah. He would 
have corrupted the laws of England, if he had been 
listened to. 

Now, the highest of all studies is the truth as it is 
in Jesus, a pure faultless life. It has this advantage, 



256 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



to begin with, that it was the form of the life of 
Christ. I do not for a moment give in to the notion, 
that Christ would have been any the less a Saviour, 
if he had been a married man. But, as a fact, he 
was not. So the example which one attempts to 
copy as a student of the sacred sciences, is to him 
normal. He comes to it by first intention. It may 
be a problem yet, whether men and women are so 
weak, that they cannot undertake to attempt the 
high regions of this sacred art, unless they are taught 
to believe in the medieval superstitions about the 
mystic primacy of celibacy before God, and its popu- 
larity among the angels. But while I remember 
that Christ praised those who for the kingdom of 
heaven's sake accepted the single life by choice, I 
also recall the incident, that St. Paul condemned the 
incipient attempts of his age in this direction as the 
doctrines of devils. But dropping the temptations of 
the sacerdotal classes, — who always interpret the 
things of the Lord to mean the things which benefit 
them peculiarly, either with wealth or power, or at 
least with tender sympathy and conscience-keeping 
of willing disciples, the soft and charming temptation 
of this age, — there is a devotion of a single life to the 
things that God loves, which- is as much a religious 
matter as the study of dogmatic divinity is to a 
preacher. As society is constituted now, it is much 
needed. Our girls are educated in an infinity of 
things which train their minds, for one that trains 
their hearts to learn self-poise and true self-assertion. 



TEE UNMARRIED IN OUR EOMES. 2 57 



I have been asked many times, as if somehow it was 
the tone of these sermons, if I think it the destiny of 
a woman, her chief object, to be married. I answer, 
profanely considered, worldlily, after the judgment 
of the fashion of the world, that passeth away : yes. 
Is it doubtful ? The birds are made to fly, the fish 
to swim, men and women to marry and give in 
marriage, till the flood come and sweep them all 
away : and what then ? But there is a higher rule 
of thought and life, and in that it is the duty of man 
or woman to be true to themselves : to have in them 
that principle of self-esteem to put such questioners 
to the blush. Imagine some bright girl in Corinth, 
among the persecuted Christians there, hearing this 
advice of the blessed St. Paul, her spiritual father, 
and heeding it. Fancy her, if you please, either 
walking the paths of single working for Christ, 
among the sensual generation of that semi-civilized 
city, far into old age, a constant example of the 
beauty of holiness, like a light shining in a dark 
place; a white- clad sister of Christ, giving up her 
yearnings as a woman, say, at the mistaken dictate 
of duty, and becoming loving, thoughtful and tender 
to all; ever wandering metaphorically with the 
patriarchs, as one seeking a city and home in place 
of the one she has foregone here— has she lost any- 
thing ? Has the Church or the world lost anything 
through her mistake ? But change it. Fancy her* 
in tears and softest regrets, giving up her lover 
to-day, and to-morrow torn limb from limb by a 
17 



25 8 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



Nemaean lion in the Corinthian arena, and how is it 
then? Does she regret, as she looks up and sees 
the rider on the white horse appearing to her 
inspired vision, as she dies, the advice of the Apostle, 
who gave her no advice which he was not willing to 
follow ? Here I venture to go back to my own 
experience, because it is quite in the way of our 
common life, and is possibly often realized by one 
and another of you. 

Every man's life is moulded by the people he 
meets. If I am of any use to you in things relating 
to Godliness, it is only from the faculty or the cour- 
age to preach back at you what you are to me. It 
happened to me, and I consider it an infinite blessing 
that it did, and have always thanked God for it, to 
know, just at the time to be of the greatest use to 
me, when I was a boy at school, learning of ^Eneas 
and Dido and people of that ilk, to know and love 
with a boy's unsunned enthusiasm, a girl some half- 
dozen years my senior, and in every way my superior 
in genius, truth and moral character. I presume, as 
I recall it, my enthusiasm pleased her, and my needs 
called for her maidenly sympathy. She was marked, 
as it proved, for an early grave, by the scourge of 
New England. In due time, much to my disgust, 
she gave her heart to a worthy man, suited to her. 
Then came the struggle of her life, till she refused 
her lover, and calmly made herself ready to go 
up among the angels. It is a long time ago, and 
only an old man's story to you now. But the angels 



THE UNMARRIED IN OUR HOMES. 259 



never grow old. But I would willingly give 
up, to-day, all that my Greek or Hebrew professor 
did for me, rather than the recollections of her. 
The act of self-denial performed in a New Eng- 
land village, and with a spirit worthy of the mar- 
tyrs, was an interpretation of Christian duty that 
I had never found in the classics. In my experiences 
of life since then, I have known many, both men and 
women, who interpret the same, and tell us the tender- 
ness of the heart of Christ, in taking care that it 
should be left on record, that multitudinous rewards 
await those who at the call of honor, duty, or con- 
science give up the rewards of 

" Isaac's pure pleasures and a verdant home,' 5 

II. And so, finally ; it is left to say a word of the 
duties of the Christians of single life in our homes. 
The first of all in my mind, is the duty of self poise. 
By this I mean that balance of inward character, 
which insures perfect self-command. How many 
restless and unsatisfied people there are in the Church. 
How many useless lives in the community — people 
who have nothing to make them unhappy, except 
themselves. They are restless because they are use- 
less, or they think themselves so. Religion is gene- 
rally esteemed to lie in certain religious things, in the 
Prayer-meeting, the Sunday-school class, the lecture 
in church or mission, or in some specified works of love 
or of self-denial. These are all of them important 
and not to be disregarded. They arc the practical 



260 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



sacraments, which greatly help on the salvation of 
many persons. But in my view, man is the religious 
thing, and not this or that work. All that you or I 
do may be very religious, and yet not come in the 
category of any of the sects. The high duty of the 
Christian is to make his life a continual example of 
goodness, and to make things that are true, real in 
the sight of the world. 

The words of Peter to women were that they 
should have a life and conversation which should be 
eloquent of the power of the Divine in their souls. 
This is impossible if we are not satisfied with our lot 
in the changes and chances of the world. It may be 
that our lot is hard. I have seen people who seemed 
to have no interest in anything or in anybody about 
them ; but is it right, or wise, to give up in the race, 
and cultivate this style ? A sickly sentimentality is 
fain to repose on the lap of the family and settle down 
into mere inanity. In my judgment there is great 
danger in either the state of invalidism or of loneliness 
of condition, lest the sufferer may relapse into selfish- 
ness, and grow into the exacting temper of indiffer- 
ence to the call of real duties to others. Pity is 
sublime, and sympathy with the disappointed is 
excellent; but either may be exaggerated into 
injurious qualities, and become anything rather than 
Christian graces. There is a duty for those who may 
be said to be able to lead their lives without careful- 
ness. They, if Christian believers in the story of the 
Gospel, have a mission to men,. that needs no lona 



TEE VNMABBIEB IN OUR HOMES. 26 1 



journey to find pagans, for whom they may labor. 
It is still possible to realize the old story of the two 
patriarchs. Our homes need the prophetic spirit of 
those who have time to care for the things of the 
Lord ; to see to it that Lot is not lost in the cares of 
Sodom, to carry the knowledge of their visions to 
him in the midst of his worldly cares, and as the text 
has it, strive to attain the power to be " holy in body 
and spirit." There are those who can do this and rec- 
oncile the perplexities of the homes, which are dear as 
they are happy, and dangerous as they tempt us to 
linger too long in their cares and pleasures. For this 
we need not go beyond our doors for the field of 
duty. 

" The trivial round, the common task, 
Will furnish all we ought to ask : 
Room to deny ourselves ; a road 
To bring us daily nearer God." 



XVI. 



THE SICK IN OUR HOMES. 

"Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort ; who comforteth us in 
all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in 
any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of 
God." — 2 Cor. i. 3, 4. 

HAVE heretofore, in these discourses, 
looked mostly at our homes as they ought 
to be ; as the remains of the Eden which 
man lost by his sin : reminders, in tin's vale 
of tears, of an ideal happiness, that each one uncon- 
sciously claims as his birthright at the hands of the 
Father of all. The instinct of self-love, or I might 
say even of self-preservation, shows itself in the 
desperate energy that we exhibit in resisting the 
approaches of disease or persistent sorrow into their 
placid retreats. The graduation of sins in our minds 
is made on the basis of the detriment which is offered 
to them. Crimes against the eternal rule of right 
are often obscured by the deflection in this lower 
sphere. The commandments of the Decalogue are 
constantly perverted from the ideal of their original 
intention by the present dangers to our peace. 




THE SICK IN OUR HOMES. 



263 



Evil which, in the view of pure spirits, and in the 
comparisons of a sound philosophy, is the denial of 
the divine sovereignty and departure from the 
standard of the supreme will of Him who knoweth 
all His works from the beginning, is constantly lost 
sight of, by the injury that is done now and here in 
the relations of society. We might ask even of the 
most Christian assembly : " Who begins to calculate 
the greater degree of sin and guilt, that lies in the 
breaking of the first law of the Decalogue, the having 
no gods but one y in its greater threatening of woe, 
when contrasted with the lesser evils of murder or 
adultery ?" The former guilt is as a fountain, from 
which all other sins issue. But we mortals are 
engrossed in the single streams, which endanger our 
life and peace now. We leave the horrid fountain to 
the dreams of another life. Our best efforts are put 
forth to secure the spider's thread of this single life. 
We often forget the higher duties to Him who alone 
can make it either pure or tolerable. 

But evil is the heritage of mankind. 'By sin came 
death/ and all that brings it on us. It is the glory 
of the Gospel of Christ, that He alone of all the 
teachers of religion, has laid the great laws of His 
Church in the deep foundations of this one question 
of human sorrow. It is the Church which has its one 
great sign in the uplifted cross. We can know 
nothing of its reality, until' we are willing to know 
the significancy of the doctrine of " Christ and Him 
crucified " — a perfect man enduring unmingled woe. 



264 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



We are baptized into His death ; we rise again, as we 
consider Him who for our sakes became destitute of 
all things. The mystery of the great creed of His 
creating, is the victory over evil, by enduring it; 
over sorrow, by rising on its dark wings to the peace 
that passes understanding, because it is given, not as 
the world promises it. The conquest of this early 
dream of youth, of sensuous delight, is the true 
philosophy : is the reward which is set before us as 
believers. The Cross is phosphoric. It shines the 
brightest in the darkest hours. The profoundest 
argument for the verity of our ideas of God, is at 
last the proof of the individual experience, as the 
believer finds that its realities advance in the exact 
proportion to the decadence of mere earthly comforts. 
As the garish light of the common day departs, the 
stars of the upper deep appear. Into the home 
where some Lazarus lies lost to earth, comes the 
Saviour, with the news of a sleep that defeats death 
and opens the gates of immortality. In every true 
experience the one end of practical religion is the 
alphabet of the cross ; the gradual conception of the 
lesson which Christ is engaged to teach His pupils ; 
namely, that it is established in the nature of this 
sinful world, that whom the Lord loveth He is bound 
by that love to chasten. The rule is inevitable. It 
is as natural to the higher life as the love of the 
fathers of our bodies, that they discipline us, by one 
common rule. It is in line of this acknowledged 
thought, that I would consider the duties of the sick 



THE SICK IN OUR HOMES. 26$ 



. and wounded in mind or body, and the correlative 
duties towards them, in our homes. 

I. And first, I wish to give the word sick, its 
widest meaning. There is sickness of the mind, and 
of the passions, yea, of the very appetites, as well as 
of the body. The advance of science is seen in noth- 
ing more than in the conviction that it is surely and 
steadily producing in the general mind, of the mis- 
fortunes which beset the wills of men. I visited Ran- 
dall's Island on Friday, and after going the rounds of 
the work-shops, then stood in the hall, as the long 
lines of boys passed by me on the way to their din- 
ner. Everything had been pleasant to my eye until 
then. The institution is an honor to the civilization 
of the age. It is the Christianity of the State set out 
in living characters. It is the last and best commen- 
tary on the text : " Pure religion and undefiled be- 
fore God and the Father." You see just how far a 
State has gotten on its way towards the great Church 
of the future. It is the municipal protest against the 
infidelity of natural selection and the expulsion of 
the weakest. It is the one achievement of the cen- 
tury, which cannot be sent on to Philadelphia, for it 
must be seen to be understood. It is the strongest 
argument against the morbid fear of the return of the 
tyrranny of the priesthood. We, as a community, 
deliberately accept the fact of our degraded classes. 
We do not send them out to a penal settlement, and 
hug ourselves that we are a step in advance of the 
Brahmin, who plants his obsolete workers in the mud 



266 THE CHUMCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



of the sacred Ganges and disposes of the difficulty by 
this tender superstition. We do not induce them to 
emigrate to some incautious neighbor. We accept 
them. And it is a noble faith, with all its mistakes, 
that it is a duty to make the best of them. They 
look happy. They are at work suited for them. 
They were just then, as they passed me, on the one 
pursuit, in which we all are kin, on the way to dinner, 
with full anticipations and good appetites. But as 
they passed, some hundreds of them, picked up out 
of the streets ; truants, either by choice or necessity ; 
some having what we call politely, friends, and some 
poor waifs, who were better off having none, it was a 
gloomy picture to my eye. Such a collection of 
small skulls, of narrow temples, of low foreheads, and 
eyes dull with the prolepsis of idiocy and insanity in 
the distance, I have never dreamed of. The Asy- 
lums of the Insane are not a circumstance to it. It 
ought to be made a part of the scientific report of 
some society, to accurately report these facts. 

We talk of the vice of poverty. I thought then of 
the disease of it. Scores of those boys, in the very 
shape of the skull, tell the sins of the great city, as 
they are seen by beings in the sky. They are not 
insane. They perhaps never will be. But they are 
the serfs of the future. They are to be the fathers 
of future lesser minds, till idiocy ends the story. 
Taking the word disease in its original sense, they 
are the most dis-eased of all. Yet they are and must 
be our fellow voters and fellow workers in society. 



TEE SICK IN OUE BOMES. 



267 



We accept them. We suffer the evils of training 
them, in the faith of a grand advance of the great 
body of society. We are like an army. We take up 
the wounded and march on encumbered with them. 
I mused, as I stood there, on writing this sermon, and 
those boys together • and asked myself this startling 
question: What if St. James had been warden of 
that school, would he have said, as the thought came 
over him, that some were perverting the Christ- 
idea, and he wrote : " Pure religion and undented is 
this " ? Just how would he now put it ? What is the 
truest way of reducing his words now, into the liv- 
ing thought of to-day ? Must we Christians of the 
nineteenth century accept the assertion that those few 
men, who knew only the barbarism of Jerusalem and 
Rome, be always the rulers of the literal forms of 
human thought and action ?— the infallible directors 
of its spirit, they are by right. But while the faith 
was once for all delivered to the saints, did they not 
themselves prepare for its flexibility and adaptation 
to all the new phases of an advancing civilization and 
progress ? In those narrow skulls and low foreheads 
is the stamp of an inevitable disease. Those boys 
can only make unfortunate men. There is a pre- 
destination as firm as that of the stern Calvin, in the 
phosphates that direct their brain matter, into the 
ways of gross and evil living. Their fathers have 
eaten sour grapes, in the slums of the metropolis, and 
their teeth are set on edge. Where is the responsi- 
bility for them? Some day one and another of 



268 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



them will develope moral or mental insanity, and 
then the problem for him will be solved. What 
solves it for the one who always hovers on the edge, 
and never quite falls over ? Has the infinite Father 
decreed them all to hell, ages ago ? It would re- 
lieve the brain, if not the heart, to think it. They 
cannot rise to our standards, unless we recognize 
them as diseased, just as much as the lunatic and the 
lazar. 

Now, what those boys are to the State, all manner 
of sick folk are to the home; i.e., the problem by 
which to realize the Christ, as living here and now. 
There is a sentimental thought of Christ as living 
always, to keep up authority in Church castes. It 
has had a long popularity. The divine, as he engages 
in the act or ceremony of authority, claims, and I 
believe properly, Christ's promise to be with him. 
The claim is just. But it is a sentiment mostly, unless 
it goes farther and makes the presence a reality to be 
judged of by its results. The authoritative presence 
is to produce the substantial. The one is to the 
other as the theory of light, for instance, is to the 
substance of light. One tells that men have a right 
to see, ought to be allowed to see, ought to see ; the 
other lets them see. All orthodoxy of belief is in- 
tended to produce the possibilities of action in the 
line of the things believed. You believe in the doc- 
trine of vicarious suffering. Well ! It is the standard 
of the faith, flying in mid-air, lighted by the bursting 
bombs of the battles of the night of the past. But 



THE SICK IN OUR HOMES. 269 



God makes it real. He puts you on a course of 
training of vicarious suffering, and where is your faith 
then ? Ah ! how you fight against it. How you 
struggle and murmur at the affliction, and go to the 
ground and hunt round to see where it sprang from. 

There are no perfect Edens: there are no fault- 
less homes. Facts tell us this much. The inspired 
word tells us the same. "Whom the Lord loveth 
he chasteneth." It is the same thought in another 
form. You are to accept your lot, your want and 
burden, your cross, as the best for you. I willingly 
grant that all men are to resist evil to themselves and 
their families to the bitter end, with all their might. 
It is inevitable and right to do so. It is an indo- 
lence of weakness to give up and moan, when we can 
do valorous help to anybody. But the sad color of 
an earthly stain will infect the fountain, guard it as 
we will. It is just there that Christian faith becomes 
the reality to each soul. Given a family, in which 
there is nothing but sensuous happiness, and there is 
danger in that one fact, to all the members of it. It 
was largely because of this fact and law, that the 
Saviour so often warned the rich of the dangers of 
wealth. It was the startling maxim of Father 
Abraham to Dives ; not charging him with a single 
sin or crime: " Son! thou in thy life time receivedst 
thy good things." That was all— received them— 
loved them— lived for them, nothing more. Religion 
is the life of the soul, its openness to the things that 
are spiritual, pure, divine, eternal. But a man who 



2JO THE GRUBGH OF TEE HOUSE HO LB. 



has his all now, in the perfection of happiness, his 
purple and fine linen and sumptuous fare ; ah ! can 
you or I fault him much, if he takes his ease in ver- 
dant Sodom, and forgets the fact that there are other 
things beyond and beneath his valley of Eden ? 
Home, I claim, is the great original Church to us all. 
Here I teach you : there God is always teaching you. 
Here you listen to words, or to the hymns of the best 
thought of good men. There you stand face to face 
with facts. Here you can choose, there you cannot 
escape the teacher. Here, there may be error : there 
is none there. Here you worship with the assembly : 
there is the lonely closet, into which the Master takes 
you, and shuts to the door, and tells you of the ways 
of God the Father, how pitiful he is : how He sees 
the great sickness that is coming over your soul, and 
the medication which is to cure it. 

The touch on so delicate a subject ought to be as 
tender and skilful as the hand of an angel. I know 
how one flinches at the thoughts which I hesitate to 
advance. u The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and 
a stranger meddleth not with its joy.'" I certainly do 
not mean to go a step beyond the help that the Gos- 
pel offers to give us in the troubles of home-life. 

I. Let us take trouble for granted. The rich envy 
often the carelessness of the poor. The poor envv 
the state and conveniences of the rich. I have lived 
freely among all manner of men. I believe nothing 
more than I do this ; that the circumstances do not 
make happiness. The human soul is the one greatest 



THE SICK IN QUE HOMES. 



27 I 



thing in the circle of our knowledge; it constantly 
makes its own fate ; it conquers circumstances. Give 
it health, (and its health is truth,) and it is its own 
arbiter of the outward world, so far as we can now 
see : 

" The soul is its own place, and of itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven/ ' 

"Man is born to trouble, as the sparks to fly up- 
wards." I know this was the wail of a terrible 
sufferer, and has a sound of gloom in it. But where 
lives the man who may not echo it? We, as 
democrats, with an idea that all men are somehow 
equal, and an indistinct notion of what that equality 
really is, are nervously occupied our lives long in 
concealing from ourselves and from others, the 
knowledge of facts in this direction. What tragedies 
of desperate struggle pass on the secret stage of the 
homes where men hide the fox that is gnawing at 
their vitals. How long a man and woman will 
torment themselves before they will confess to failure. 
And all manner of sickness, whether of mind or body, 
is so far, failure. We strive to build up a happy 
home, as we would have it. We wall it round and 
fill it with all that we think useful to make it the 
seat of refined bliss. We do it bravely and re- 
ligiously. We, like the man in the parable, are just 
about to say, "Soul, take thine ease;" when some 
voice drops out of the clear sky, not in anger, to 
begin in us a training for some better fate than we 
have projected. Sickness, in some of it forms, enters 



272 THE OHURCH OF TEE HOUSEHOLD. 



the sacred retreats, and the Divine opportunities 
begin to develope themselves before us. Say, for 
example, a man has been tried in the hard school of 
the daily fight of business, and all the time been 
gainer; that is, as he began poor and became suc- 
cessful; he became gradually a better man, only the 
dust of the street would get in and begrime his 
virtues. He was hard and suspicious of men. He 
held on to his success with a strong grip. He rolled 
himself up in a spinous coat of pride, and lost many 
of the softer ways of his kindlier nature. He had 
formed a scheme of life, not wrong, exactly, not 
offensive, perhaps, only selfish in the main, and 
unworthy one who is to be found among the sons of 
God in the Resurrection. Imagine one of us, forty 
miles above him, or better, one of his own family, in 
the rest of the blessed, looking down upon him. We 
try to solve the question of how to reach him, save 
him from himself and win him to a nobler cultivation 
We see that if left to himself he must become nar- 
rowed and unworthy. We are to raise him. And 
the question is, how ? 

Christ answers it, by ordaining a minister of grace 
to him, in the form of some beloved child, or sister 
some failing or defective member, who is infirm in some 
way, whose mind, or heart, or body is put to suffer 
in some one of the long catalogue of diseases.' 
borrow comes and takes a seat at his board. He is 
proud of intellect; the difficulty comes in the way 
of mental weakness. He is haughty above others ■ 



THE SICK m OUR HOMES. 



273 



the woe takes the shameful turn. He is lofty and 
looks down on common men ; lo ! before he knows 
it he is the pensioner of the pity of an ordinary 
mechanic, whom God has ordained to be the very 
messenger of goodness to him, and do for him what 
all his learned friends and rich friends cannot touch. 

The threads of social law and interest run in a 
singular tangle in our society. We all need each 
other — strangely come to do it. The proudest man 
I have ever known, had a son, whose first career was 
enough to humble ten men like his sire. Then he 
took a turn and redeemed himself. We do not take 
too much for granted in believing that God is train- 
ing us all, and all together. If so, the training is on 
some comprehensible rule. That rule is seen more 
than in anything else, in the sick of the home. And 
here I turn to the text in the two sides of: 1. The 
duties, or rather the position of the sick. 2. Then 
the like duties, or rather position of the rest of the 
household. In the text St. Paul thanked God ; and 
He dwells on the titles of His goodness, calling Him 
endearing names: because He had helped him to 
comfort others, by Himself having had previous 
need of comfort and received it, in His personal 
tribulation. He was able to comfort them which are 
in any trouble, " by the comfort wherewith we our- 
selves are comforted of God. ,, This is a Christian 
rule. It is the Christian rule. It is the reality of 
the doctrine of the atonement. Without it, all the 
orthodoxies of the Church are as sounding brass. 
18 



274 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSMHOLD. 



It is the Cross made a verity. It is Christ at one's 
hearth-stone. The position of the one in trouble is 
sacred. Like all sacred things, it has two sides. In 
the Hebrew language, it is a fearful fact, that the 
words which belong to God, like consecrated or 
blessed, take two sides of themselves. Now, they 
mean the blessing, and again the devoting to woe. 
It indicates one meaning at the bottom, which is true 
to all the uses ; namely, that all sacred things and 
opportunities are of this double species. 

So is it with the sick. They may become any- 
thing but blessings to themselves, by selfishness. 
They sometimes lose all the advantages of their own 
trial. They become accustomed to the refined care 
of friends, and the generous attentions of the family, 
till they lose all sense of reciprocal responsibilities. 
Sickness creates in them a morbid desire for sym- 
pathy and self-inspection. The events of the family 
life must move around their constant self-assertion. 
The children must laugh only when they are at ease. 
The regulation of all the members must revolve 
around their exactions, or they are unhappy. Now 
there are duties of the sick, just as truly as to them. 
I could give instances enough in point of the mistake 
which good people may make, and lose the opportu- 
nities of doing immense good to others. If religion 
is the work of the man in his home, then the conver- 
sion that he is to accomplish, is by the teaching of 
his life ; his patience in suffering ; his " comfort 
wherewith he is comforted/' by the secret Springs 



THE SICK IN OUR HOMES. 



275 



of lofty spiritual character. Find a querulous invalid 
whose whole thought always is on her own pains and 
aches, whose story of wrongs is ever the same, that 
she has the darkest and hardest lot : that she cannot 
find out why she is tried so severely. Behold her 
going from one cause of sorrow to another, and none 
of them worthy a moment's thought, and it is with her 
as it is with an unworthy priest ; a great opportunity 
is always being sacrificed by the two alike. God just 
as truly ordains the sufferer in His Church, to show 
the law of vicarious sacrifice in example, as the 
preacher to preach it. The one tells how Christ 
suffered, and the other exemplifies it. Somehow we 
do not ever practically get at this. Pick up books of 
devotion at a venture, and they tell the sick anything 
else rather than this. They fail to communicate the 
faith that the piety that can comfort them, and in 
doing it rise as incense to the God and Father of 
light, is the faith which recognizes the opportunity of 
being like Christ, in resignation and spiritual conquest, 
as they are made like him in condition. It does not 
need intellect or talent to exhort. The Lord de- 
liver us from invalid exhorters, in or out of the sick 
room : I mean those who do it on system. I can 
find you twenty popular shams in this method. The 
Lord bless the patient loving souls who bear infirmity, 
and sorrow, and pain, with a sweetness that often 
makes the sick room the gate of heaven. Call up 
again the man of whom I spake. Put him to school 
to such a priesthood. Let him study the gospel 



2/6 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



scheme without knowing it, at the feet of such a suf- 
ferer, dear to him as ever, winding into his sacred 
feelings by love first, then by admiration, then by 
an almost adoring pity, and he may, if he will, lo- 
calize the presence of Christ in such a sacrament, 
and adore it. Moses put off his shoes from off his 
feet before the burning bush ; it may be pardoned 
if he is tempted to do it, as he sees a Christian 
sublimated in this sacred fire on the altar of home. 

Finally, I would say a word to those who have 
this problem, in one or another of its forms, in their 
homes. The first duty of your condition is to have 
a faith in the home religion that may mingle it with 
the ecclesiastical. The latter is essential, in its place. 
But it is not all. The sacraments are generally 
necessary to salvation : the home piety always. By 
the tie of Church-membership, you are bound not to 
lose the love of the brotherhood, in the refined self- 
hood of your families : but the family is the scene of 
your training. There you meet the problems of life 
and immortality. There you are being disciplined 
for the duties of the life out of doors. The house- 
keeper who neglects her household, to visit the 
widows and fatherless in their affliction is in error. 
The man who puts the thirty-nine articles before the 
piety of home, is in the same error. You have tried 
to make home as the garden of the Lord. It is so — 
only that some trouble has invaded its retreats. 
Perhaps it is your own fault, that it is so ; perhaps 
not. In either case, study your own problem in tb i 



THE SICK IN OUR HOMES. 277 



faith that God knows better than you do what is 
good for you. I thank Him for compelling me 
to recognize one fact, which it has taken many an 
application of the rod to drive into me : that He is 
wiser than I am in the practical work of life. You 
have an irretrievable sorrow. It is bound on your 
back. You cannot look for anything that you can 
do to take it off. Now, as a man, bear it ; but as a 
Christian, accept it. Work it into the web of life 
cheerfully. It may be a color that you did not 
choose ; it may be the one color that will outshine 
the rest in the last great trial. Your Church may be 
lofty, and its arches true to the highest religious 
thought of the past. Thank God for so much. 
Your psalms may be heard in it, lifting men to the 
sublime of thought and feeling. But I remind you 
that the song of the sacred Psalmist, which you and 
I could least spare to day, was written in tears, in the 
secret closet of a home desecrated by his own fault, 
and charged with a sorrow that never lifted on this 
earth. Look on the peace that passes understanding 
as coming to you often in " the comfort wherewith 
you can be comforted" by those whom God afflicts. 
I claim every asylum to-day, as the triumph of the 
Church. And angels see to-day, as always, the 
Christian work being done in the homes of Christians, 
who accept their cross and find it in the sorrows which 
the world cannot lift. May God help us to so follow 
Christ in truth. 



XVII. 



HOME, AS PREPARING MAN TO 

DIE. 



" Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace \ according to 
Thy word. 1 ' — Ll'KE li. 29. 



X the past ages of the race of mankind, 
the matter of religion has gained a gloom, 
that is unbecoming the times in which we 
claim a purer knowledge of the nature and 
will of God. There is almost an infinite distance 
between the low conception of the God who rules us 
as it lies in the mind of an ignorant pagan, who is 
taught to appease the powers of evil and call that 
religion; and the serene mind of an enlightened man 
of our churches who neither propitiates the devil nor 
fears him. Something of the same remove is seen in 
the past The butchering rites of sacrifice, which 
would simply shock us if we were once to witness 
them, the blood-stained priest, the smoking fire 
tainted with the consuming flesh of the victim ; the 
reek of incense, which hardly kept the offensive odor 
in due bounds ; that untold general condition of the 



BOME, AS PREPARING MAS TO DIE. 279 



ancient temples, that poetry and divinity alike pass 
over in silence, but which were very serious facts 
about them, and moulded the religious instincts of 
men in many ways ; all these things lent a sensation 
of horror to the thoughts of the Divine being. He 
who was believed to be dwelling behind the'smoke 
of the incense and accepting the blood of innocent 
victims, offered in propitiation to his wrathful mind, 
was a God to be feared, before He was loved. 

Christ abolished all this. Men have been trying 
to save as much as possible out of the wreck made 
by His merciful revelation ; as if the God of our love 
must still be feared before He is loved. First, it was 
the most natural thing, that the early sufferers for the 
truth should make this mistake. Any man living 
among earthquakes must feel that there is a terror in 
the word nature, which a man living on more solid 
ground never feels. Then followed ages, in which it 
was probably impossible to have influenced bold and 
irresponsible men, with any refined ideas of a Being 
far off in the heavens. They were ruled by their 
fears alone, or at least chiefly. Men sometimes adore 
the dark ages ; but they show to us by the sorrowful 
spirit of their religious notions as much as by any- 
thing else, the shadow of gloom that had settled on 
them. After the horrors of persecution and the 
grossness of the sensual and cruel robbers, whom we 
call barons, had ceased, a poetic sentiment still stimu- 
lated the religious conscience of monks to perpetuate 
in their litanies and hymns the old style of gloom in 



2 80 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



regard to things called religious. Five hundred 
years ago, there were two classes in the State ; the 
religious and the secular. The former held piety to' 
consist largely in the heroic and the intense ; in fast- 
ing and prayer; in working out their salvation 
exclusively with fear and trembling ; in finding the 
kingdom of heaven through much tribulation. The 
joy of life was left to the secular and the vulgar. 
The vulgar thus set off to themselves fell into sin, for 
they were compelled to begin their revels with the 
conviction that they were on the playground of the 
devil. Thus in time two ideas came down to us, and 
they rule us now unsuspected: one, that the spirit 
of piety is a sombre spirit, and teaches us to approach 
the Deity with the bated breath of fear, rather than 
the joyful spring of sons. The other fancy which 
rules us is the idea that piety is always the intense, 
the striking, the stimulant of wonder, the flash of the 
lightning, rather than the commonplace, the ordinary, 
the plains of duty, that are somewhat tiresome and 
dusty, rather than the hill-tops of exalted vision, 
where one stands, as it were, " Heaven-controlled." 

I must cut across both of these notions, in manag- 
ing the subject of Home, as helping us to make ready 
to leave life naturally, and as nattwe zvould have us 
do it. As home is on the whole a happy place for 
the most of men, it is not in the spirit of it, to help 
us to any sort of gloomy seriousness. How often I 
see this illustrated, I dare not say. Sometimes sitting 
by the bed of a dying man or woman, whose life has 



HOME, AS PREPARING MAN TO DIE. 28 1 



been natural and happy, and whose disposition has 
been joyful : who is meeting the stern fact of death 
with full courage, and with unquestioned tenderness 
to those being left, it is always easy to see the dis- 
turbing influence of the old monkish notion, that 
there is an appointed way to die ; that men must be 
forced and gather seriousness by intention, as if God 
were on the watch to catch them at a fault. And 
again, at such times, we dwell on the things that have 
been only ripples in the deep still current of life, the 
foam on the surface, made by a few falls and rapids, 
and we forget that the long unnoticed times have 
really formed the character for eternity. Men will 
have it that sin is to be now, as it was under the Law. 
One only and main idea of piety is held to be sacri- 
fice, in some sort, as gloomy as that of old dead 
religions. That is supposed to be the element to stir 
in us the love of beauty and goodness. They will 
have Christ speak still in the voice of Moses ; and 
somehow idealize the old Temple service as it' were 
to regulate tire temper of the Church of the Redeemed. 
That kind of piety, in my judgment, is not much 
dependent on the life of home. And I do not really 
know how home can help us to have it. Home is 
the opposite of the intense ; it is the place of rest, of 
peace ; the refuge from the storm, 

" A present help, when dangers press." 

Who desires the excitement of a stroke of lightning 
on the chimney about which his children gather, that 



282 THE CHURGH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



he may see his name in the next day's paper ? But 
we remember the one moment of danger, and forget 
the long days of monotonous security. 

Now, I consider that it may be proved that it is 
as natural for man to die as it is to be born or to live ; 
and that there is a natural law that comes in to 
modify the sentiments of religion and the doctrines 
of divines. To explain what I mean, by its being 
natural to die, so that it must modify our ideas of the 
true religious sentiments, I refer you to the laws of 
nature, as to the death of animals, or even to the fall 
of leaves, or the changes of flowers. Any one can 
easily feel, in regard to favorite animals, that death is 
a blessing. It is as natural a part of their course as 
any other thing about them. The preparation is 
pre-determined, not only in the decay of their func- 
tions and the slipping away of their happiness in 
existence, but there is a prevision of this last change, 
for which those functions prepare them. The end of 
life is in no manner an accident. In a perfectly 
healthy process of nature, there is a regular acceptance 
of the results. Dr. Livingstone was for some seconds 
under the paws of a monstrous wild lion in the 
swamps of Africa. The brute had wounded him as 
he dashed him to the ground and stood above him 
in the act of killing him. He escaped, and testified, 
that by some unexpected pose of his faculties, he 
found that in the time of his danger, he had no sort 
of physical fear. The nervous system, or the mental- 
physical system suddenly developed a new law. He 



HOME, AS PREPARING MAN TO DIE. 283 



looked up at the beast, with a sort of narcotized con- 
tent. Fear gave place to a dream, as it were. He 
reasoned, afterwards, that possibly in nature, it is 
provided that a law of mercy comes in, in the case, 
that removes from all the victims of carnivorous 
animals the sense of dying, and makes it measurably 
painless. 

If Livingstone had lived five hundred years ago, 
he would have ascribed his condition then to a 
miracle intervening in his favor. It is a truer civil- 
ization, that taught him to see in it the power of law. 

But if we go to the analogies of the vegetable 
kingdom, the law is perfectly evident, that the coming 
on of the change from growth to decay is as natural 
and lovely as any portion of the progress of growth 
itself. It is as interesting to the botanist to trace the 
promise of decay in a plant as the blooming of a 
flower. Poetry tells us that they bloom to die. 
Science, on the other hand, reveals that they die to 
bloom. Indeed, the power of blooming is graduated by 
the other process. Nothing has the appearance of 
suddenness or unexpectedness. It moves on a rule, 
that shows the unity of goodness in one part as much 
as the other. 

But it is suggested, as an objection, that man is a 
sinner. True ! he is : and there is a purely religious 
part of the subject Redempti on is the equivalent 
of sin : hope, of penitence. My position is that there 
is a natural law, which is bound to modify, by right, 
the religious part. I am thinking all along of one 



284 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



who is at peace with God, the right man who has 
accepted the covenant of the Gospel and lived 
measurably accordingly. The false sentiment is that 
he must die unhappy and with voluntary gloom; 
that the only language fit for him is the moan of the 
prodigal. St. Anselm and St. Francis were taken 
from their beds, as soon as it was evident that they 
were about to die, and placed naked on the ground, 
or on sack-cloth, and sprinkled with ashes, while 
admiring brethren stood around and watched the 
unlovely scene as they passed away. The scene was 
true to the piety of that day. Is it necessary to that 
of ours ? I think not There have been ages when 
the robe of those monks was considered the only sure 
couch on which to find the last repose. They have 
passed away forever. We may mourn the decay of 
sentiment, and of ecclesiastical faith. Let us, in the 
mean while, act by such as we have, namely, the faith 
in law, the sentiments that are begotten of it. 

The true influence of home, if it is real, acts on 
the sound man, as a power, in the course of his whole 
life, here and hereafter. The old monkish feeling 
that the way to heaven lay only in the path of tribu- 
lation and voluntary sorrow, yet hangs on us, and 
we are always missing the influences that belong to 
our circumstances. An ideal of what piety ought to 
be, to conform it to the standard which they have set 
us, interferes with the acceptance of facts as they are. 
These facts are : 

I. That home helps us to grow old. It may do it 



HOME, AS PREPARING, MAN TO DIE. 



285 



in either the mode of satisfaction or of disappoint- 
ment. If a man is prosperous ; if he succeeds in the 
objects of honorable pursuit and acquires a fair share 
of the goods of life, he finds, on trial, that there is a 
mysterious law, or rather an unexpected law, which 
his prosperity developes, that earthly joys, in a 
healthy mind, bring on it a profound dissatisfaction. 
Take the rich man, like Zaccheus ; the best use that 
he can make of his gains, is to scatter them. I do 
not speak of the conscience, stimulated by a religious 
sense of duty; but of the ordinary reason on things 
as they exist Here is one who has forty times more 
money than he can make any personal use of. 
What is he to do with it ? There is a limit to self- 
glorification, in healthy minds. If one likes diamonds, 
there is a point where diamonds cease to fill the 
vision of an immortal intellect, when their precious 
glint begins to suggest that there is something better 
to live for, some higher thought, which they only 
suggest. If one has power, he soon discovers that 
the only power, after all, is to work for others. He 
rules forty kingdoms. He can only govern them for 
the good of others : one of them is all that he can 
indulge his vanities with. Take a man of learning. 
He learns nothing more practically than the law of 
his mind, that all he knows is either capable of use 
for others, or is vain. It is impossible to focus more 
than a sufficiency of light on any one spot. If you 
try to place more, you begin to deflagrate the sub- 
stance. The Bible gives all this argument, in the 



286 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



two books of Solomon. That wail of his, " Vanity 
of vanity," is the gloom of a successful man. But it 
was also the wail of a Jew, whose hopes of immor- 
tality were dim,* compared with the mind of a 
Christian who lives in the light of the Gospel. Now 
that life and immortality are brought to light in the 
revelation of Christ, the natural workings of the 
illuminated reason of the believer should make him 
give up his hold on the good things of the world, 
without that gloomy struggle that marked the 
experience of the Israelite. The void, of which the 
poet speaks, " which the world can never fill," he 
should never look to the world to fill ; but accept 
the weariness of satiety as properly drawing him 
from lesser to greater good. A learned writer 
speaks on the theme on this wise: "The inferior 
creatures find in the objects and scenes of earth 
enough to satisfy their limited natures. But we are 
mightier than the perishing world; and therefore 
find no rest in any earthly thing. There is here no 
pillow for the head, no home for the heart, for the 
pilgrims of eternity. Our rarest delights, our noblest 
experiences, speak to us most forcibly of our immor- 

*" The Jewish religion is characterized in an eminent degree by the 
dimness of its conception of a future life. From time to time there 
are glimpses of the hope of immortality. But, for the most part, it is 
in the present life that the faith of the Israelite finds its full accom- 
plishment. 6 The grave cannot praise Thee ; death cannot celebrate 
Thee. . . . The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this 
day.'"— (Isaiah xxxvii. 18, 19 ; Psalm lxxxviii. 12.) Dean Sta?tZey y 
Hist. Jewish Church, Lec. vii. p. 173. 



HOME, A 8 PREPARING MAN TO DIE. 287 



tality ; just as the strange midnight sky, lit up by the 
southern cross, brings sad thoughts to the heart of 
the sailor on the Pacific Ocean, and reminds him 
how far he is from home. Our restlessness in the 
midst of rest, our feeling of weariness and incom- 
pleteness even in the midst of the richest feast of 
joy, are perturbations produced in us by the attrac- 
tion of that higher world which is our native country. 
And that tinge of wistfulness, which comes over our 
souls when we stand on the calm pure heights of 
life, is like the purple hue that bathes at dawn and 
sunset the mountain summit that is nearest heaven, 
and assimilates dull rock and brown earth with the 
etherial splendors of the sky, teaching us that the 
sun that sets on our earthly home rises again on our 
heavenly."* 

Or again, take the disappointed man, who has 
more or less missed the objects of his ambition ; there 
is for him the preparations of advancing age, and its 
issue, in the teachings of his home. The other, we 
will say, has the positive side of the power ; he has 
the negative pole in his hand. For him the God of 
mercy and all comfort has laid up stores of prepara- 
tion in the history of the race in its relation to God. 
On the one side we see there the opportunity of the 
return of the prodigals who have spent their early 
patrimony, and seek the possibilities of a late repent- 
ance. On the other side, many of the saints who 



* McMillan, " Sabbath of the Fields," p. 85. 



283 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD 



pass across the scene have found in the disappoint- 
ment of their first hopes the seeds of an enduring 
comfort The not finding a city here, is the Divine 
argument for one that hath foundations. The eye 
that looks for no relief in the stern laws that rule this 
lower circle of time, has its energies directed to the 
regions where there are the consolations of hope, of 
recompense, and pardon. It happens every day in 
this latitude, in the cases of consumption. The 
thoughtful invalid sees the light of common day 
gradually dying out, and another mind coming on. 
He begins by struggles to resist, as the thought of 
failure from the busy world intrudes, and then one 
after another the struggles cease. A soft feeling 
intervenes. Day unto day uttereth speech to such, 
and night after night teaches them wisdom. Why 
should it not be so with us, even without the intrusion 
of disease ? Why not take the lesson that is set us, 
even of ourselves, and not be dull scholars in the 
school of the great sufferer ? 

II. Home teaches this lesson, by its losses. A 
vacant chair, an old souvenir of a child, of a sister, 
a parent, a wife, of any one who was once a part of 
our lives and then vanished from our sight, and there 
comes a messenger, whose voice is still and small, 
but it has in it the echo of a diviner thought. I 
doubt if all the provings of the schools can begin to 
reach the religious power of the shades that are 
welcome to the thoughts of the bereaved. I mean, 
the intellectual argument is a dry light : the warm 



HOME, AS PREPARING MAN TO DIE. 289 



sympathy of true love gives to the other life a near- 
ness which the heart is always craving. If part of 
the heart goes out to the vast expanse of space, the 
remainder is always following it, in search for it. 
Two facts will show this. One the frequent instances 
in the Bible, when the doctrine of immortality, and 
the consolations at the loss of friends, are prompted 
by the loss. The gospel never reasons about it 
Lazarus dies, and the teacher comes into the chamber 
of every mourner now, saying : " He is not dead, but 
sleepeth ; . . . For such there is no dying." " Death 
for us," as the poet says, " is not so much as the lifting 
of the latch, but only a step into the open air, out of 
a tent already luminous with light that shines through 
its transparent walls. The heaven within us is 
irresistibly attracted to the heaven above us, by the 
law of similarity, as the bubble of air beneath the 
water of the lake ascends to mingle with the atmos- 
phere, that rests upon the surface." 

III. It is the constant strain of affected gloom, that 
we grow old. But why ? What is there, in fact, 
about a healthy old age, that can be the subject of 
lugubriousness ? Because Solomon, after a life of 
doubtful indulgence; Solomon, a polygamist, and 
certainly no model for us, in most things — because 
he has told of the years of his, when he could say he 
had no pleasure in them, it is held to be pious to 
re-echo and exaggerate his gloomy complaints. 
There is truth in what he says. But it was a most 
judaical way of putting it. 
IQ 



290 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



Age is the autumn of our year. There has been 
blue light in the spring, when the young plants of 
hope sprouted ; red lights all summer while they 
were growing; and there is a time and use for the 
yellow tints of the fall, to prepare the ripened grain. 
We think of all the changes of nature, and with no 
thought of gloom. Shall religion alone inculcate 
this base feeling, beyond what nature imposes of 
herself ? Religion ought to alleviate it ; and does, if 
it is allowed the chance. Just as every day, we rise 
refreshed and go forth to labor, and at night sit down 
and rest, weary but not troubled, contemplative, but 
content, willing to see the stars take the place of the 
garish sun, that we may sleep the better, so it can 
be with this longer day. There is in the very frame 
of every true man, the preparations for his last 
change. Take that very chapter of Ecclesiastes 
about the weary days of old age, and you see the 
working of this law. The almond tree shows its 
white blossoms, the desire fails, the silver cord is 
loosed and the wheel turns heavily at the cistern ; 
showing that this animal frame has done its work, 
and like the leaves of the autumn, is to make way for 
a better thing. Suppose, for a moment, that a fiat 
should issue out of the skies that there is to be no 
more dying; all things else being unchanged. It 
would be the curse of all known curses. Go to the 
insane asylum. No one there is to die. The 
maniacs would grow old, and haggard, and diseased, 
and rave hopelessly in the gloomiest prison of 



HOME, AS PREPARING MAN TO DIE. 291 



despair. Look at the sick, who now know that the 
relief of trouble to them is the sleep that the infinite 
Father gives His children. There would be no hope 
of any, if they were to be doomed forever to a world 
where there can be no change. Look at yourselves. 
You are now part of a caravan, that is always crossing 
the dark river. Death has made way for your suc- 
cess. You would be separated for aye from all that 
you have loved ; and for what ? Only to escape the 
little act of dropping off the autumn fruits in the 
course of nature.. But you say, we are sinners. I 
reply, think on it well. Has your religion done no 
more for you than that ? Do we not come back by 
this question to the fact that I set out with, that we 
are following the exaggeration of the monkish ages, 
and giving to the Divine countenance the look of 
severity that it was the intention of the Saviour to 
destroy ? Is it or is it not possible to have a reality 
of possession, so that a man can trust himself to die, 
and to think of doing it without being put out of his 
way, and laid on the sackcloth and ashes which 
Anselm affected ? I believe that the only way in 
which he can cure this monkish tendency is by the 
acceptance of a view of piety that has its original in 
the home where God puts a man to work out his 
problems of life. We are sinners; but are we 
saved by grace, or no ? If we have done the best 
we can, then we are surely salvable. If we have 
done the meanest sort of work only, in the vineyard, 
then there is the more grace. Either way, can we 



292 THE GEURGE OF TEE EOUSEEOLD. 



say, as old Parson Johnson did, on his death-bed, in 
a few hundred yards of this place, to the question of 
a clergyman: " Do you believe in Christ now?" 
" No:" said he, " I don't ; now I know in whom I 
have trusted." 

Is it not a duty for a man to believe, that this 
moment he is approving the good and pursuing 
it, to the best of his powers ? He may feel like 
a man at the bottom of a hill, and it is a long 
way to the top; but it is just here that his faith 
would help him if he would give it a chance. I put 
it in another way. Here is an old Christian. He is 
not perfect, but he is sincerely bent on the rightest 
thing he knows in everything. He might be better, 
and he knows it. But he will die very much as he 
is, with his face turned Zion-wards. Now, as I look 
at it, God gave His Son to teach us the verity of the 
humanity which we feel to be the just principle of 
judging each other. You and I would say of such : 
"He is a good man; let him pass on." How does 
God say different, through the lips of Jesus of 
Nazareth ? I stilled the horrors of one dying man 
once by this word to him : "If Jesus of Nazareth 
were here now, sitting in this chair, and had heard 
you say all th'at you have said to me for the last 
hour, do you not believe that He would say to you : 
'This was all known to Me eternities before you 
were born. I came down on this very errand, to tell 
just such troubled people as you are, to find God 
through Me. Now put your hand in mine, and I 



HOME, AS PREPARING MAN TO DIE. 293 

will take all that you have said of yourself for granted, 
and lead you to the light' " 

Now take an extreme case, for I am not afraid of 
the principle: and cannot afford to be, after sending 
a man out of the world with such advice. Here is a 
man who is mentally blind to sectarian doctrines 
He does not see that he is obliged by the decrees of 
the Council of Nice, or to know where Nice was. He 
is baptized, or he ought to be. He has very little 
skill at divinity, and what he has is somehow set 
awry by his inherited memories. His father, we will 
say, was a Swedenborgian, and his mother, well, say 
she was a Quakeress. He has not had much time to 
make out either the Thirty-nine Articles or the 
Calvinistic Five Points, and has the smallest anxiety 
about either. He is a good man: a good father, 
brother, friend, citizen, and a religious man. He 
fears God, and his heart warms up to the life of 
Christ, till the essence of the story of it is the very 
joy of his heart. He believes that Christ did the 
right thing in all He did. He is always trying to 
do the thing nearest to it. And yet you cannot 
square him to any creed, he is so blind. Has he a 
right to trust to the truth that has been melted into 
his life by home pieties, though we cannot analyze it, or 
place it ? I think that he can. And that if we do not 
have that sort of truth melted into our life, we cannot 
put confessions of belief in the scale to serve as make- 
weights for the lack of it. It is this reality that I think 
we all need, to teach us to cut looss from the exaggera- 



294 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



tions of the past and the fanaticisms of this age, and 
go back to the home-life for the tests of the character. 
There we can find gentler thoughts of the Father, 
who is known to us best in the line of home thoughts, 
and find in our religion the courage to trust him fully, 
and consent to grow old and pass away from this 
scene, when our turn comes to do it, as those who 
exchange one home for a better. Yea, it is possible 
now, without much stretch of fancy, to see the aged 
Christian now standing like Simeon, the righteous, 
the true man, and holding the Christ in his arms ; 
able, without a tone of grief or melancholy to con- 
tinue his chant in our day : " Lord, now lettest thou 
thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy 
word." 



XVIII. 



.THE HOME IN REST. 

"For he that is entered into his rest, he also has ceased from his 
own works , as God did from his." — Hebrews iv. 10, 

HE chief thought that strikes me in this text, 
is the continuousness of the work of God, 
as the index or hint to us of the continuity 
of the life of the souls of sanctified men. 
In one sense, and that a good sense, God did cease 
from his works. He ceased from creating new forms 
of matter. It may seem to us a matter of fanciful 
choice, as we take it for granted thoughtlessly. We 
may suppose that he could as well have rested on the 
second or the third day, as to rest on the seventh. Or 
we may imagine that he did it for the sake of the 
example; as a foundation for the coming Sabbath, 
and a sort of Divine poetry, on which to move the 
imagination of the race. I am unable to rest in such 
views of the Creator. There is an interlinking of all 
his works, one with another. There is as much 
connection in the kingdom of grace as in that of 
nature. We need not be able to find out the secret 
links. They may not be revealed. We can still 




2 9 6 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

believe, from all that we do know, the unity and 
continuousness of all that we do not know. Look off 
for a moment from the Scripture to nature. No one 
who catches the spirit of the laws of the natural world 
ever doubts for a moment that there is no room for 
any break or change of intention in all its mighty 
operations. Ages circle up into notice, and as one 
effects its work, it sinks gradually out of sight to 
make room for another, which, as the apostle says of 
death, and the Christian conquest, swallows it up 
Death is swallowed up in victory;" that is/nothing 
is lost, though all is changed. The ages may yet be 
traced by science in nature as they were revealed to 
Moses, as being six great change-periods chiefly 

But though the epochs were six, the demonstration 
and continuance of the creative energy was one. 
The work was one. The Sabbath on which the 
Creator entered, was not one of idleness or vacuity 
nor did it imply a change of purpose, but only, so to 
say, the continuance of the species which he had 
before created. When man was seen to stand on the 
edge between the created and the Divine, and the 
mystery of all things made itself felt; a being who 
could be the subject of great and precious promises, 
after passing through the toilsome ways of sin ap 
peared; then the work of mere creation was finished 
and the equal work of preservation manifested itself ' 
It is equally true, in this sense, that God rested 
from his works; and that, as Jesus said, in justifica- 
tion of his healing on the Jewish Sabbath: "My 



THE HOME IN BEST. 



297 



Father worketh hitherto, and I work." It was a 
peculiarity of the system of mere law, that the Jews 
should have the one reason given to them to enforce 
their Sabbath, and of the Gospel, that the Church 
should be able to perceive the other reason as the 
guide of the consciences of her children. 

All that I seek to gain from this text, to-day, is 
the thought of the divine analogue, which seems to 
have flashed on the imagination of the writer. " God 
entered into his rest." His week-day toil was over. 
Ages on ages the fiery star had been cooling down 
to the point where the crust of heated granite began 
to shut in the fires that blazed across the corner of 
creation where it was set revolving. Then in the 
steam and mist of countless spaces of enduring time, 
the solid and movable portions of matter learned to 
rise and take their places in the mighty scheme of a 
round world. At last, when the grand total was 
accomplished, and man rose on the green sward of 
the Garden of the Lord, with the capacity of enter- 
ing into friendship with the Creator, the long week 
was ended. The rest of enjoyment began. God 
walked in the garden, in the cool of the evening. 
Spiritual life rose superior to physical. In place of 
growing vegetation, or singing birds, or sportive 
animals, the oneness of the image introduced the 
delights of friendship, the interchange of thought, the 
growing and expanding intellect, and the develope- 
ment of the life of the soul. It was not the rest of 
idleness, but of work still : work nearer to the grand 



298 THE GHUROH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



consummation for which the Creator issued the origi- 
nal fiat, " Let there be light." 

Now this idea of rest, is the chief use of the word 
in the Scriptures. If you think of it a little, it must 
be so. To you or me, say, death is the cessation of 
everything. If we say, a man rests in death, the 
thing which we see before our eyes impresses our 
minds chiefly. Rest signifies to us, the doing noth- 
ing at all. It is a blank ; nothing more. It is a 
horror; mere vacancy, insensibility, absence of 
thought and love. The best thing that we can say 
of it, is : " Our friend is not." But when the All-see- 
ing-Eye takes in the same fact, there is no cessation 
of one of the laws of His kingdom. The earth of the 
body of the loveliest saint goes back to its earth, the 
ashes to its ashes, the dust to its dust, by the same 
law that called them out of the earth at first. It is 
no cessation of work; no impression of failure. The 
circle of perpetual change revolves still, without a 
check in its advance. Nothing good is lost, nothing 
true is disturbed. Thus, when the Son of God had 
it in charge to talk to us in the language of the 
angels, he never spake of death as other men did. 
He always betrayed the native consciousness of the 
incessant progress of law in the dead, as much as in 
the living. He said, « The maid is not dead, but 
sleepeth." The pulse does not beat, but another pulse 
still beats in the frame of nature which takes in her 
body and carries on and fulfills the will of the Creator. 
Again, " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth, but I go that 



TEE ROME lis REST. 



299 



I may awake him out of sleep." Lazarus was dead 
to Martha and to mortals : to Jesus and the angels, 
he was asleep. To her there was only the hope of a 
final resurrection in the last day, a mighty miracle 
and break in the order of creation, a great horror 
and chasm between them. To Jesus, there was the 
presentness of the resurrection. " I am the Resurrec- 
tion and the Life." So, when the Apostles at last 
caught the idea, the death of the Christian became 
only a sham and a nightmare. To die became to 
be with Christ. Certain ideas of the Divine had 
entered into the spiritual nature : and they were as 
the light imprisoned in the souls of the believers. 
Oceans could not quench it again, Nothing could 
separate them again from the love of Christ ; a Sab- 
batical life dawned on them ; martyrdom became a 
fanaticism. 

There was a Lord's Day to follow this week of 
work. St. John heard a voice from heaven, and then 
heard another great sigh of relief echo it from the 
Church on earth, answering, Amen, " Blessed are the 
dead who die in the Lord, from henceforth : yea," 
saith the Spirit in the hearts of the churches, " they 
rest from their labors and their works do follow 
them." It is this grand thought which St. Paul is 
aiming to explicate in this passage. He is straining 
at a nobler thought of rest than ever dawned on the 
pagan mind ; a rest of Sabbatical labor, a rest of 
song, as the redeemed practise the song of Moses and 
the Lamb. It is not the rest of the idler. It is the 



300 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



rest of the worlds as they run down the ringing 
grooves of change— it is the rest of the angels, as in 
appointed orders and ranks they do always the will 
of God in heaven and earth. It was not pause, or 
vacancy, or decay. It was not so that God gave his 
beloved sleep. It was not the dreamless sleep of the 
animal man. It was the continuous life of the 
sanctified nature. It was the soul waking from the 
chaos of the worldly, and looking back on the sons 
of its growth, and whispering in the ear of the 
Redeemer, "it is all right;" it is at last, by thine 
example, proved to have been "very. good." " 
Look at his instances for this suggestion. 

I. You have the picture, in few words, of the dreary 
march of the Israelites across the waterless desert 
to the rest of Canaan. There was a fearful possibil- 
ity of not entering into the rest of the land of Canaan 
There was a might of faith in the obedience to the 
law, which could evolve the character of the 
heroes who should enter into the labors of that con- 
quest and the cultivation of the soil. There was 
continuous work, only varied. 

II. He rises naturally to the great subject of his 
proof. God rested after the long night of chaos. 
He crossed the wilderness of the fern ages, and the 
long, unreasoning, pleiocene periods, to enter at last 
on the Sabbatical day of his redemption of man 
And in his usual manner the writer runs the two 
instances together, keeping uppermost, all through, 
his main idea of the continuity of the consciousness' 



TEE HOME IN BEST. 



301 



of the parties. He completes his thought with the 
blessed^ words, as derived from both thoughts : 
" There remaineth, therefore, a Sabbatismos, i. e. y an 
essential Sabbath, one made up of all the foregoing 
ideas ; a work-rest period, as God work-rested, as 
Joshua work-rested in conquering and then in ruling 
the promised land." Thus he reaches his summation, 
for the instruction of the church. " So," he would say 
to us," death is the Sabbath of God : the Jordan of Je- 
sus, the leader of the hosts of the true Israel " for he 
that is entered into his rest," (and who is this he, but 
the Christian who has fallen on sleep), " he also hath 
ceased from his own works as God did from his." I 
repeat, that the main thought of this chapter is the 
continiionsness of the conscious life of the believer. 
He passes from his home here to "his long 
home." We see him keeping a Sabbatismos in the 
temple of the New Jerusalem. We behold him in 
some one of the olive-clad homes of the land of 
promise. We discover that it is a revealed truth, 
deeply impressed on the hearts of the inspired writers, 
that the life we lead here is the one best known to 
us as the prototype of the next. 

Fancy the laboring man in the city of Antioch 
reading this passage. Six days he is toiling, and in 
constant danger of the rage of the enemies of the 
new faith. Six days he is tempted of the devil, and 
drawn down to lower thoughts by the occupations of 
the hard, unbelieving world. Six days he goes in the 
strength of his Sabbath thoughts and lies down weary 



302 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



and dusty, doubtful and care-worn, on the eve of 
the Sabbath. He rises on the seventh day, to draw 
near to the throne of the Crucified, and take into his 
soul the higher life, the purer thoughts of the better 
world, the balm of his sorrow, the antidote of his sin, 
the armor of God against his spiritual enemies and 
troubles. He is not the same man that he was all the 
week. He is another sort of man. He is stronger, 
brighter, greater than he was. The hut in which he 
is living, widens out into a temple. The duties that 
gave him so much care^ are tinged with light from 
the celestial walls. He moves to the step of the 
great army of martyrs. Like boys on the street 
keeping step to a band of military music, he is trans- 
formed into a double consciousness. He sees through 
the seen into the unseen. 

There is this idea of rest from chaos, or rest from 
the wilderness, in our faith of another world ; and 
coterminous with it is the thought that there is a 
necessary identity in it, now and then. In other 
words, if we look to the revealed declarations of the 
Bible for our answer, as to the home of the soul, the 
chief fact which comes to the surface is the identity 
of life now and then. There is a Divine analogy, or 
parallelism, which is always making itself felt. As 
the Divine work is one, under apparent variations,, so 
the life of man rises from the world of sin and sorrow 
to a rest from them, but not to a blank of the main 
issues of it all. God rested from his work. God 
never rests from working. He sustains in the sun- 



THE HOME IN BEST. 



303 



shine the creatures for whom he originally wrought 
in the mist and fog. It is Sabbath day with Him 
now ; but it is a day of higher work, of intenser life, 
so far as He is related to us. Therefore, the argu- 
ment is, the rest of death is as like the work of this 
life, dropping the body only, as the Sabbath-day is 
like the Monday or Friday. On the one, we look 
down to the soil, we delve after dust ; on the other 
we are the same men, but it is the privilege of the 
sacred time, that we can dream of a higher walk ; 
that we can take sweet counsel together, and walk in 
the house of God as friends ; that the scenes of life 
can be touched with the light from the Sun of Right- 
eousness. 

The life that we live here is the parent of the next. 
" Heaven is but earth made richer," I said just now, 
only dropping the body, and the distinction is plain. 
There is in every one of us, in so far as we are think- 
ing beings, a separate life, the life of thought and 
feeling, the reverie and the keen anxiety of the future, 
the sense of sin and guilt, the fear of punishment We 
toil and drudge long after the wants of the body are 
satisfied ; we are all being driven by this second life, 
by the passions of the mind. The larger portion of 
our religious experiences lies in the contest between 
the sense of a right and wrong, that require a faith in 
something higher than the things that are seen. The 
lover of fashion is in a sense living after a faith in 
something which art declares necessary. The man 
of pleasure who rises above a brute, gilds the horizon 



304 THE CHUBGE OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



of his low landscape with some sort of faith. It is 
the other part of us asserting itself. We may well 
say then, dropping the body, the identity is certain, 
as a fact of revelation. In this body of clay, we fear 
death. There we lose that fear. Think, for a mo- 
ment, what the world would be to one who could ut- 
terly lose that fear, and retain the sense of the truth, 
that God doeth all things well. We lose the pains of 
sickness. There God shall wipe away all the tears 
from the eye. But this very sort of promise implies 
the sameness of the real life. When Abraham re- 
proves Dives, he reminds him of the compensations 
which link the two parts of man's destiny. He talks 
in the tongue of that age, it may be said ; and it is 
true. But it is the tongue that the Bible always uses. 
From the garden of Eden till the end of the scenery 
of those sacred pages, the same thought appears, in all 
the pictures of prophets, sages or apostles. And 
Christ stands in advance of them all, denying that 
death is a fact of any significance to the true believer. 
He always speaks of the Christian experience as one 
and continuous, from the first throb of joy at pardon, 
to the strong shout of the conqueror. It is as a river 
which for a while runs in the narrow gorge of the 
mountains, under the gloom of the dark cypresses 
and wailing firs, tossed with rapids and vexed with 
cataracts. Then it emerges into the sunny meadows 
of the land of Beulah. It flows with a softened 
sound, and the heavens are reflected from its glassed 



THE HOME IN REST. q 0 



surface, and we muse of things that pass man's un- 
derstanding. 

The first objection to this, is that there is so 
much that we do not know, of the other world, that 
most Christians refuse to accept any determinate 
thoughts about it. It dwells in their minds, at best, 
only as a haze, a splendid fog. You can see that they 
esteem it pious to have the vaguest notions of that 
which is the sternest of realities. We do know very 
little, but we know enough. We know that as a tree 
falls, so it must lie. We know that as we go out of 
these homes of ours, we go all that they have made 
us. We know that the judgment that meets us the 
moment that we put off these bodies, is the great 
trial judgment of the deeds done in the body, which 
the soul carries with it to the world of eternal spirits. 
It is not the outside life before the world that alone 
comes into the view, but the life which lies under 
that chiefly, the life of home, on which all the rest is 
being formed. It is this identity of the two con- 
ditions, and the interlinking of them, which makes the 
teaching of Christ to diffar from all other teachers 
before Him. He is always consciously in both con- 
ditions. He lives here and He lives in the real life 
atone and the same time, as he said: "I and the 
Father are one," and again : « the Father worketh 
hitherto and I work." Now, if the faith in Christ is 
a real belief, that He has developed the right con- 
sciousness for all his disciples, it is not necessary 
that we should know the halo of the atmosphere of 
20 



306 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the paradise of God; it is only useful, that we realize 
the fact, that we are the same beings there and 
here. We are here in bodies of the earth, earthy 
and transient. The same soul which is developing 
in the life of every day, lives there, the same. Many 
pious people live by intention in constant effort at 
compunctious preparation for a future judgment. 
The true faith is in present decision of that great 
question— in so living that our hearts do not con- 
demn us. We pass out of the secure home of the 
. soul here, knowing, that wherever we go, it is to a 
purer home, which is provided for us. The next 
objection, which is sometimes felt and occasionally 
expressed to this identity of life now and then, is the 
fancy of men, that the gospel has intentionally 
thrown the vail of undefinable spirituality over the 
future state. Nothing is farther from the truth. God 
does not reveal to us many things which we can 
know of ourselves. He gave us reason before He 
revealed anything to it. Where he does not reveal 
more, it may be because what He has given us of 
reason is enough to decide all questions. Often men 
ask, "What does the Bible say?" It says nothing. 
It rather speaks to us, as Jehovah did to Moses on the 
shore of the Red Sea— asking us, " Why do you 
stand praying to me? Speak to the children of 
Israel, that they go forward." The gospel tells us 
of a spiritual body. But that body is conditioned. 
It dwells somewhere. It has need of a city without 
the foundations of these earthly homes, but a city as 



THE HOME IX BEST. 



307 



real, a home as definable as those which we have 
here. The body of Christ dwells somewhere in 
glory transcendant, and of incorruptible faculties. 
Our bodies will dwell somewhere. They will not be 
driven by the winds or exist in fanciful and impos- 
sible spiritualness. The body of the resurrection 
will be a real body, and will need a home, as truly 
as the bodies of men now. Where it will be, God 
has not revealed : but He has revealed enough for us 
to know that it will be. 

It would be pleasant, if there were time, to trace 
the revelation of this one fact through the Bible : 
that we are now forming in daily life the dwelling 
places of the soul for eternity. The Bible follows 
the teaching of nature, that nothing good ever dies. 
The truth gathers force as the story of redemption 
unfolds. Nothing in nature ever moves by chance. 
The winds blow where they list, and we may not tell 
whither they go, or when they may return on their 
predestined course; but they move by laws as 
certain as those which keep the planets in their 
courses. And above them man is held by the 
destinies of the Creator. We cease from our works, 
only as God ceased from His, to rise to a nobler and 
truer home, a long Sabbath of rest, and an inheri- 
tance among the sons of God, of all the best capabil- 
ities of the spirit which he has given us. Home then 
is the prototype of the heaven hereafter. Drop out 
all things that are fleeting in themselves, and all 
things that offend, and the residue is heaven. Purify 



308 TEE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



all the Sabbaths which we spend here : lift them to 
the best that they can do for us, and the remaining 
part is that which St. Paul called, "The rest which 
remaineth for the people of God." Drop out all the 
means of culture, the religious expectations, which 
then will turn to realities, and the sacraments of all 
degrees, that will then be overwhelmed in the 
fruition of perfect holiness, and the residue is eternal 
life. We sing in the words of the hymn that the 
joys of brotherly love make the Church to be, " A 
little heaven below." It is true as far as it can go. 
There is a power greater for good in the purity of a 
peaceful home. It is God's school for the forma- 
tion of His children in the ways of godliness. In 
that upper world there is no sun nor light of the 
moon, for the light is in the nature of the souls of 
the redeemed. There is no temple there, for the 
glory of the Lord is the atmosphere of the land of 
the redeemed. There, faith gives up her charge of 
the man, for it expires in sight. There hope be- 
comes satisfaction in enjoyment, for where all that 
can be wished is possessed, there can be no longer a 
wish or a hope for more. Only the love, which has 
been learned here in the homes of the good, will 
remain. It will expand and take in all the hosts of 
the saved, and bless the soul forever. But it will 
hold every home-tie, as strongly as it does now. 
We shall not marry nor give in marriage, but we 
shall not lose one sign of our true personal life there, 
that we should wish to keep. That love we are set 



TEE ROME IN REST. 



309 



to learn now. God help us to work out the lesson. 
May our ideas of His will blend softly with the toils 
of life, and sweeten the cares that sometimes op- 
press us, in the rush of the world. Let us take 
thought to make home a school where the love 
of God shall consecrate our daily duties. The rela- 
tions which it creates, are divine, and they are 
paramount. All other relations are subordinate. 
The law requires us to be good citizens. The 
Church demands of us the profession of the faith 
once delivered to the saints. But nature commands 
the heart to run in the channels of fathers and 
mothers, of children and fellow-helpers, in order that 
the others may be effectual. It is sometimes 
imagined that the Church creates virtue; that her 
sphere is semi-miraculous ; that she saves us out of 
and without reference to the home-life. On the 
other hand, her duty is to point out to us the way of 
virtue in. common life. We can never come into 
harmony with the Bible until we recognize the law 
on which it was written, to teach us how to live. 
The Church baptizes your children into the covenant 
of life, but she gives them back to you, with the 
charge that " ye shall see to it that they are virtu- 
ously brought up to lead godly lives." She spreads 
for you the Lord's sacred board ; but, it is to pive 
you strength by the way, for your several battles of 
life in your households. The actual living is at 
home. There we can create the types of the better 
life, where there is no temple. For there we form 



310 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



the characters which go with us up to that throne, 
where we are to be judged by the deeds done in the 
body. In them we are now working out our salva- 
tion, and when we have done the work set us, we 
too can rest from our own works, as God did 
from His. 

"All which is real now remaineth, 
And fadeth never ; 
The hand which upholds it now, sustaineth 
The soul forever. 

" Leaning on Him, make with reverent meekness 
His own, thy will, 
And with strength from Him, shall thy utter weakness 
Life's task fulfil. 

* * * * 

" Then of what is to be, and of what is done, 
Why queriest thou ? 
The past and the time to be are one, 
And both are now." 



XIX. 



HOME— ITS VACANT PLACES. 



" And he took her by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha-cumi : 
which is, being interpreted, Damsel (I say unto thee), arise."— St. 
Mark v. 41. 

HIS was her mother-tongue. And possibly 
this was her mother's early morning call. 
She had heard it from infancy, every day 
summoning her from refreshing sleep, to 
her joys and duties. It was indeed the very sublime 
of religion condescending to the humblest lines of 
common life. It was in little what the great Incarna- 
tion was in substance, God manifest i?i the flesh — the 
Life Eternal touching the life lowly and common. 
We may recall our own recollections of the one voice, 
which once soothed us or roused us in childhood ; 
the voice which was ever truest to us, when most 
simple and familiar. We can understand why the 
pen of St. Mark dropped into the record, the very 
Syriac words which Jesus used, at the moment, to the 
little girl of this peasant family, when He summoned 
her soul back to her place on earth. The uninspired 
mind looks up to a deed like this, with the ambition 




.112 



THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



>o invest it with rich halos of celestial light The 
mind of Christ, on the other hand, looked down upon 
it, to see in it a perfect simplicity. Our doubtino- 
hearts, heavy with worldliness and cares of living 
keep afar the thoughts of the "Father's house of 
many mansions." We say of a lost friend, now, it 
may be, with the rabbis-" I know that he will rise 
again in the far off, tremendous resurrection, at the 
last day." Jesus felt the other life so near and so 
truly present with us all, that He has always treated 
it as the simple co-ordinate of this one. He sel- 
dom speaks of a future time in divine things. His 
sense was of the presentness of the true life. The 
maid was not dead to Him— she was only sleeping 
Lazarus too, though he had already seen corruption 
in the tomb, was only heavy with sleep, as He looked 
on him ; was only waiting for Him to come that He 
might awake him out of sleep. So to Martha He 
spake those wonderful, simple words, which tell us 
now most vividly of perfect peace: "Jam—not so 
much, I will be— hut lam the Resurrection and the 
Life." I now give you and all mourners to the end 
of the ages— the living— the winged worJs-^hvth 
shall dispel the clouds of sin, doubt and moral death 
from your souls, so that he that liveth and believeth 
in Me shall never die. 

There is a legend in Persia, that during the seasons 
of pestilence, when Azrael, the Destroyer, has ful- 
filled the number of deaths, a single drop of sacred 
dew falls through the lethal atmosphere, and the 



HOME— ITS VACANT PLACES. 



313 



magical power of death is ended for the time. 
There is a drop of sacred dew in the knowledge of 
that truth which the Son of Man both said and did, 
in the three acts of raising the dead, and then Him- 
self coming back again from that old rock-bound 
Sheol — whose iron gates had never before been thus 
invaded — and as quietly, as if it were the simplest 
thing to do, said with a tone of love that killed all 
strangeness, " Mary " — and flashed into a woman's 
soul the first light of the living Lord and Saviour. 
So it is in harmony with the sublime familiarity of 
Jesus on all the points of this subject, which men 
had pondered and consecrated with all solemn and 
august symbols, as the one great dread and dark 
horror of the race — that He shouH have used the 
dear mother-call to this little girl — in words most 
familiar to her youthful ear — as if she only had slept 
soundly for a night, and were drowsing too long — 
1 Talitha-ciimi — ' Little one — get up.' 

Religion comes to us, at last, with its greatest 
powers, in the familiar haunts of home. Pure religion, 
to the first Pastor of the Mother Church, was found 
in two of the most familiar things — pity and purity. 
To the Seer of Patmos, the eagle-eyed Divine, it was 
to be sought in Love. There God dwelt, and there 
He could be found. The Evangelist of the first age, 
turned from the perplexed reasonings on divinities to 
find his solution of all casuistries in the principle, 
that " Love is the fulfilling of the law, the fulfilling of 
of all law — the end of all doubts and fears/' So in 



3H THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 

all times, the inner circle of man's life is his home— 
and there angels come to visit him— and there " the 
windows of agates" are always standing open, 
through which he daily looks away to eternal things. 

Let me now call you to these thoughts of our 
homes, which are simple enough, but which are most 
potent for good. The vacant places of our homes 
are sacred to us as the gates of pearl. All powers of 
religion are demonstrated by what they can do in us. 
" God is in you." The eternal is yours— and, in the 
mystic work of holy thought and life— there is a 
sense, in which you need take no note of past or future. 
There is a faith, which, like the magical gift of the 
caliph's bath, looks at once directly into the realities 
of the things "which are unseen and eternal." There 
are chambers in our homes, where loved ones are 
sleeping, and there are places in our hearts, where 
they are always felt to be breathing with the regular, 
soft airs of a diviner health. There are spots in 
Greenwood, where of a sunny Lord's day, we sit on 
the soft grass that weaves their covering, and we 
hear the winds which sing a low requiem, and, softened 
by a diviner sense of life in death, we are able to 
turn back to the toil and vexation of the week with a 
renewed patience. Would that Christians would find 
in these direct messengers, the signs of a consecration 
which needs no endorsement from synagogue or 
sect All the preacher can do is to talk about them. 
They are "God's own visitations "—God's own 
ministers in mercy— His great catechizings by which 



HOME— ITS VACANT PLAGES. 311 



He takes us at our word, when we profess Him before 
men, and begins to make us worthy to be confessed 
by Him at last. 

In all our homes are these sensitive blanks— these 
spots where an electric current will thrill the inner 
man, to connect him with a better and a truer life 
St. Paul taught it. « If ye be without chastisement' 
whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards and 
not sons." And after myriad echoes of the same law, 
a poet of our own has repeated it : 

"There are, who, like the Seer of old, 
Can see the helpers God has sent, 
And how life's rugged mountain-side 
Is white with many an angel tent !" 

The departed make a genuine part of our families 
Often it is made sadly true, as was said by a sorrow- 
ful man: "They live with us, who die— they die 
who live." They are sleeping. They are in Para- 
dise— and they are none the less with us. So then, 
in a sense we are with them in Paradise. 

By the selfish view of our own future, we are all 
the time putting away from us the home-thoughts of 
another life. Where all hangs on one dreadful i«sue 
which is set in the far distance, and which can be 
anticipated only with vague horrors, that gather 
about it inevitably, then the whole tendency of 
thoughtful minds is to forget it more or less, to slip 
away from it on the first opportunity, and relegate it 
to the doctrinal area of ecclesiastical discussion. The 



316 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



best men among professed Christians are often seen 
to halt and hesitate at the commonest words of hope, 
as to an escape from the left hand side of the judg- 
ment-seat of Christ. Those who are evidently sincere 
in their profession of the faith of God's Love as 
manifested in His Son, who was given to die for 
their sins, do not dare to utter the apodosis of that 
truth — " therefore He will with Him freely give us 
all things." We reason out a few of the simple 
promises of His great Covenant, as if we were dealing 
with Him over the grave of a dead Christ. We 
may be able to utter now and then some of the 
coined texts of the early saints, as what we should 
like to claim for ourselves, if we dared— but we, as a 
generation, are mostly inconsistent in recognizing the 
powers over us in religion as first of all present with 
us — as now in us and others. Religion, we will have 
it, must be honored, as it is removed from our ordi- 
nary convictions. Piety takes on a veil of false 
humility, and thinks to honor God, as it exalts Him 
to the same metaphysical farness, which once left 
the nations in darkness, and tempted the best of the 
Gentiles to satisfy their natural yearnings with in- 
termediate 'false gods.' 

The religion of home alone teaches to see God in 
Christ as " very near to everyone of us." In its 
sacred, and no less sacred because familiar retreats, 
He does not leave Himself without daily witness, 
that He does good and gives us all things freely to 
enjoy. Christ was God manifest in the flesh — first in 



ROME— ITS VACANT PLACES. 317 

the form of the Son of M^y~next, and ahv^in 
the persons of those wh®se spirit He has chastened 
and purified, that we may read in them every day 
the lively epistles of His Spirit of grace. The chief 
teachers of such nearness of the diviner powers of 
rehgion are those who have been ours for a time, 
who have been known to us in the forms of flesh and 
blood, who have toiled by our sides in common 
duties, who have won upon us by their graces, and 
given to holy words and phrases the reality of daily 
intercourse. They reflected on us for awhile with 
gentle, almost insensible irradiation the love of 
Christ, and then they heard a call to depart and 
follow Him in the garden of the Lord. We had 
learned from them, before we knew to what the 
lesson tended. We had conned the alphabet, before 
we suspected into what names and to what high 
purpose the letters would come. God— as the first 
prayer taught us in early life, is our Father. We 
never saw Him. He was known of old, dwelling in 
darkness, and His voice was loud with terror when 
He spake to men of old time. In some way He had 
manifested His inner nature in Christ— but we thought 
of Him, even then, as the Being of secret mysteries, 
veiled in immaculate purities, and infinitely averse to 
all manner of sin and infirmity, coming to offer, in 
some strange and subtle way, the elect robe of im- 
puted righteousness; and coming again at the end of 
the world to judge the guilty, and with ineffable 
majesty to give the signal to angel-reapers to gather 



318 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



up the wheat and cast out the chaff to final burn- 
ing. 

Meanwhile there was near us a father, who was to 
us as no other man ; who always judged us by a 
tender opinion of our weakness, who denied himself 
and toiled for us, who meekly endured us and waited 
long for our recognitions of his love ; who walked 
before us in justice and mercy, and then, when, " as 
compassed himself with infirmity/' he had offered 
prayers and supplications first for his own sins, and 
then for ours, went within the veil and disappeared, 
whither Jesus the forerunner had gone before. Soon 
as we gazed on the vacant place, the tracks of both 
thoughts began to run together. The subtleties of the- 
ology became instinct with a life, that found its response 
in our hearts. The earthly father gave form to the 
indefinable lines of the heavenly Father. The divine 
came out of the thick darkness. The eye that filled with 
tears over the loss of the guardian and best friend of 
childhood, saw reflected through the tears — as by 
strange lenses, the identification of the two modes of 
life. We looked along the pathway by which he 
had gone, and the instinct of a better faith told us 
that God is in us to will and to do. Christ is with 
us men of trembling heart, even to the end of the 
world. Death, which severer theologies are always 
investing with horror, comes to be a truth of life. 
We lose the horror in the hopes of those who have 
left our side. There is a holier presence in the 
vacant spot, which tells of the father of our flesh, 



HOME— ITS VACANT PLACES, 



319 



who corrected us and we gave him reverence. We 
learn quicker how the Great Father of us all is con- 
tent to be seen in the angle, which the earthly form 
once made. We learn the living Christ by the light 
which His Spirit gave to the example of a progenitgr. 
We can grasp some thoughts of how God was in 
Christ, forgiving sin and uncleanness and bearing- 
with our infirmities. 

There is a crying need of the re-assertion of this 
simple faith. It is the need of the age. First, the 
divinities of celibates who did nobly their hard works 
with the grossness of dark ages of robbery and 
tyranny, of sensuality and scorn of all finer feeling ; 
and next the vagaries of mere preachers, who have 
built into their stupendous sect-theories, as much of 
' hay, straw and stubble/ as of gems and gold, and have 
made men scientifically religious as they make them 
despisers of common thoughts, have left us yearning 
for a simpler faith in the powers of a present, a living 
Christ. Men turn away from the churches, and will 
turn from the noise of their jangling more and more. 
The churches in their present state of confusion and 
competition may raise their call to them in vain. 
Individual thinkers, both those who accept their 
trammels and those who reject them, receive little 
help and less conviction from their call. The softer 
glow of a half-rational emotionalism, born partly of 
animal excitements and partly of an intellectual heat 
which conceals the thinness of its own enthusiasm, 
attracts the weaker classes. The strong feel less and 



320 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



less the need of Church help, and lapse more and 
more into careless ease and forgetfulness. The 
nation looks in vain to this ecclesiasticism for aid 
Nothing demonstrates it more than the confusion 
which marks our treatment of the two races of 
minor children, which providence has committed to 
our care. We are the most cruel of stepfathers to 
them. God save us as a people from the measure 
which we have meted to them. Every great effort 
at reform in the "sins which are a disgrace to any 
people," exhibits the same powerlessness of Church 
motive, to arrest the evils and to heal the diseases of 
the commonwealth. How are we to escape the 
vortex, which is drawing us all down to a world of 
mere Babelism ? Shall it be by unity in Church- 
life? Well! It would comfort many to think it. 
But while the evils are gathering and 'the sounds of 
storm and earthquake are growing quicker and 
louder, while red men are warring and dying out on 
the frontier, and black men are sinking away from 
our reach or looking to heathen Africa as a 'refuge 
from the wrongs of our Christian sympathy; while 
strikes, which have struck as yet only once, are only 
gathering for oft-given blows; while defaulters are 
hiding the characters of treachery and deceit under 
the sanctimonies of Church-profession, and with in- 
creasing impunity, so far as the churches are con- 
cerned, the order of our time is increasing disunity. 
Every ecclesiastical bond on earth is weaker to-day 
than it was twenty years ago. The very plea for 



HOME— ITS VACANT PLACES. 321 



unity is given on that lowest of all religious motives 
—the wish to avoid evils. When the spirit of Christ 
reigns supreme in one or many men, unity is the 
yearning of all the higher souls. It takes form as 
the Celestial Bride, who needs only to wave her hand, 
and all do her lowest reverence. She sheds a breath 
of celestial perfume " out of the ivory palaces," and 
all are too glad' to follow her beck. 

How shall we reach the mind of Christ ? By fol- 
lowing Him— by doing as He did— thinking as He 
thought— and praying and loving as He has taught 
us— and doing it, as He did in the homes of men. 
Now, it may be a strange thought to some, but it is 
very true to my mind, that the ecclesiastical forms of 
piety ^ are not the prominent features in the life of 
Christ. The home forms are. His work as a Re- 
former, re-forming the thought and culture of the 
world, kept him mostly silent on all positive questions 
of ecclesiasticism. He spake with severe self-restraint 
on all such matters. He is seen in the temple— but 
not of it. He sits in the synagogue occasionally, but 
says no word there, which might not have been said 
on the lone mountain-tops of the Caucasus. But by 
the well at the way-side, by the city-gate, under 
palm-trees and sycamores, at the tables, in the sick- 
chambers, at the graves of individuals, He speaks as 
never man spake. In His teachings, confessedly only 
the esoteric principles, which could afterwards take 
form in Church-government, were enunciated. In 
common sympathies and needs, in lowly joys and 



21 



322 THE OHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



sorrows, in questions of troubled consciences or 
vexed minds, He spake openly, and as never man 
spake since. When a man sets himself to reproduce 
in himself the real Christ— he goes to the historic 
page to lift the picture out of its antique setting and 
make it live before him now." He goes around all 
the later imitations of it, all the false copies of His 
life, whether by the artist or the dreamer, the priest 
or the preacher, to talk with Christ Himself. He 
finds then, to reward his search, the Home-Christ, 
rather than the ecclesiastical. Christ, the High 
Priest of our profession took on no hue of either Jewish 
priest or medieval sacerdotalism. He is equally free 
from tix&propkesyings of the ascetics of the old or of the 
modern preacher. The one who would seek Him as 
He ever liveth to teach, as well as to make interces- 
sion, is to make the inner light of the great Teacher 
his own. His rule is a simple one, to think as Christ 
did — do as He did— to love and pray after His 
model. For example, while the same evils raged in 
Judea then which trouble us now, He had one theory 
of reform to which He always kept, and exemplified 
daily— to bs pure. Every disciple gained to this 
faith was the « seed of wheat,' gained for a harvest 
'of the womb of the morning' He went to the 
synagogue, but it was oftenest there that the record 
showed Him as denouncing the evils of proud tradi- 
tions. His deeds of might and His words of love 
come to us from the commonest walks of life, adorned 
with very meagre shreds of traditional grace, and 



HOME— ITS VACANT PLAGES. 



323 



owing but the smallest debt to the theories of the 
scribes. 

It is so now, with the living powers of the idea of 
Hun as dwelling in us. The one duty with us, is to be 
w.th Hun to the end," to be in any sense capable 
and [worthy of having a claim to His promise to be 
with us. 

Now the living powers which are in Christ, if we 
00k at Him, either on the page of the Gospels or 
the Epistles, are those which least of all depend upon 
voluntary relations. No unprejudiced reader of 
either set of books, is conscious of a prompting, all 
the while, to seek some new condition of external 
works ,n which he may imitate and appreciate the 
blessings of this Son of Man. Christ always speaks 
to man, as man— not as a citizen mainly, or, as He 
only knew citizens in the commonwealth of Israel— 
not as members of a national Church. The apostles 
are faithful to this same thought. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, which has the impor- 
tant emphasis, that Jesus declared it a compend of the 
Gospel, on the sayings of which, the wise were always 
to build an indestructible house of life-the unwise 
a perishing one, He has no word of a voluntary and 
limited model by which these life-houses were to be 
constructed. His idea of the beatitudes was of bless- 
ings for the meek, the pure in heart, the patient and 
self-denying. His reconsiderations of the ancient 
laws of the Mosaic system were intended to give a 
deeper meaning to the fear of God and the prompt- 



324 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



ings of humanity, in any and all human relations. 
The Woes which fell from His sacred lips were 
directed against the Church-rulers, the Scribes, who 
had made the truth of none effect by their traditions, 
who had forgotten 'judgment, mercy and truth/ in 
their zeal for the ritual propitiations of mint, anise, and 
cummin, and for the Pharisees who had compassed 
sea and land to make proselytes to a system of 
whited sepulchres and inward failures. He aimed 
not to make churchmen, but men. Note, that if the 
Church had remained of Jewish forms, as for a while 
it seemed destined to remain, the Sermon on the 
Mount would have been altogether in harmony with 
it. Or note that the same Sermon might be as 
eloquent and as applicable now, if there were no 
outward and authoritative form to the Church. It 
would be as direct now, if it spake only to every man 
in the relations which are created by nature, as it is 
in the Churches which offer to claim the blessings 
of it as exclusively their own to minister and inter- 
pret. 

We are not denying either the existence or the 
proper authority of the Church of Christ to do the 
works for the good of mankind, which are wisely 
limited and defined in the XXth Article of Religion. 
It has power to decree Rites and Ceremonies. It has 
power to abolish those rites which once held good 
and then wore out and lost effect in the advance of 
civilization. It has power to establish and regulate 
newer rites, as the wants of men demand new ones. 



SOME— ITS VACANT PLAGES. 325 

It has authority in matters of faith — a limited 
authority— and only a limited one. It is not lawful 
for it to ordain anything contrary to God's Word 
written, nor to expound one place of Scripture so 
as to make it repugnant to another. It cannot 
decree anything against that Word, nor enforce 
anything besides the same to be believed for 
necessity of salvation. It has no power to interject 
itself into the place between God and the soul, as a 
sine qua non of final salvation. The salvation in 
which it avails is here and now, in interpreting the 
great truths of God, and by its rites, convincing the 
reason of the sinner, of God as now living in Christ 
to speak pardon and peace. It has power to train 
hvmg saints in the rhythm of a purer life in their 
homes, and in the homes of others. Within these 
limited bounds it has power, and ought to receive a 
reverent respect from all. 

Practically all this might be accepted as a general 
rule, and yet nullified by the false aspects which 
could be urged upon the hearers of the Gospel. The 
profession of religion may be made to hinge on con- 
ditions, which make some things necessary to salva- 
tion, not as subordinate means, but as the final and 
all-comprehensive means, « the be-all and the end- 
all,' of the Church's life. Here let me give the clear 
witness of another mind : " All the circumstances of 
this world are winter leaves, nourishing and protect- 
ing the bud of immortality, and destined, when that 
bud is unfolded in the eternal spring, to fall off and 



326 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD, 



perish. So too the means of grace are the scaffold- 
ing by the aid of which the spiritual life is built up, 
and will be removed as a deformity when the building 
is completed. Forms of Church government, human 
ordinances, and those intellectual labors which are 
employed in their establishment and defence, are 
adapted only to a state of imperfection, to the condi- 
tion of individuals preparing for a higher existence ; 
and so far from being ultimate objects, are only in- 
struments and agencies, to be discarded when their 
purposes are accomplished."* 

The sacraments are often made necessary — not so 
much to the harmonies of a manhood which should 
result in ' Christ in its, the hope .of glory' — as directly 
and fatally necessary to salvation. A belief in certain 
forms of faith, which are looked on as divinely com- 
municated, superhuman additions to the soul — is 
exalted into the object of the Incarnation and Atone- 
ment. Church-profession insensibly takes the place 
of real character. The common mind fastens on rites 
and ceremonies, or on creeds and dogmas, as the 
acceptable offerings to the Almighty. Religion is 
contracted to a narrow and formal routine of special 
duties. It flows in a low and shallow current, while 
the great issues of life, the natural duties of men and 
women, are left outside of it. Powers are attributed 
to the Bible, in matters which the Bible takes no note 
of and leaves undecided. The cry of the pulpit be- 



* Rev. Hugh McMillan, The Ministry of Nature, p. 236. 



E0ME-1TS VA CANT PLACES. 327 

comes the alarum of enthusiasts, who miss the idea 
of Christ, in the heat of their sectarian fanaticism 
The great thought of Scripture, to repent and believe 
that we may see Christ now and be present with Him 
always, that one may carry Him to his home, and 
learn of Him how to be a true son, a faithful father 
brother, friend or citizen, is lost out of sight It is 
as a charmed amulet, which has on it mystic charac- 
ters, which shall be the pass to the gates of the Holy 
City and shall testify to a formal election, irrespective 
of character— that we hear the Gospel offered 

Now the relations which God has created He 
provides for. It is in them mostly that Christ is 
found. Read through the Gospels, and the idea 
flashes out of every page, that one finds Christ in 
these homes of men. Any one who will resolutely 
go behind all later interpretations of the New Testa- 
ment to the living page itself, will feel— and in this 
feeling is better than words-that he can always find 
Christ as a man, and learn of Him, what are the 
duties of a holy manhood. It is our duty, in the 
warnngs of the ecclesiastical divisions of the day 
each of which is saying to us: "Join me or some 
sect like me, or you are lost," to seek eagerly for that 
faith, which is most purely a faith of Christ. It is a 
duty to study the Gospels, to find Him, as He was 
that we may now feel Him with us, as He is always— 
the Son of Man. 

This duty is the creed of the Church of the 
Household. It is with its saints as true now as it 



328 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



ever was, that Jesus comes to their chambers, when 
the life is most intensified with thought and feeling, 
when we are looking on the cold, pale faces of the 
lost, and mourning of mysteries untold, that He takes 
us back to the language of familiar life, and speaks 
to our faith, < Talitha-cumi.' They whose < places 
know them no more/ are thenceforth yet better 
known by those who loved them most The bond, 
which has been sprinkled with the drops of lethal 
water, takes the nature of both worlds, and endures. 

Since the earliest ages of the world, there is al- 
ways knowledge enough for our purpose, of that 
profound consciousness of this creed, which is sealed 
by the fact of death in our families. The first touch- 
ing phrase of the departed was that they were 
'gathered to their fathers: Abraham is represented 
as paying a lordly price, 'four hundred shekels of 
silver, current money of the merchant/ to Ephron, 
for the field and cave, where he might, as it were, 
drop anchor, after his wanderings, and consecrate 
one sacred spot, which might link the city which he 
never found on the earth, with ' the city which hath 
foundations/ He piteously tells the children of Heth 
—in full audience— " I am a stranger and a sojourner 
with you." He was seeking of them a rest for his 
heart. This was to be from that period his home. 

The like pathos meets us in the story of Israel. 
In distant Egypt his heart turns longingly back to 
that rocky cave, which in all his eventful life, had 
been cherished with devout love. " Bury me not, I 



HOME-ITS VACANT PLACES. 329 

pray thee, in Egypt." And he said, "Swear unto 
me— and he sware unto him."* And again he 
charged them, " Bury me with my fathers. There 
they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife ; there they 
buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife ; and their I buried 
Leah."+ The same yearning is felt still. Sacred spots 
rise up in all memories, when the problems of the fu- 
ture seek to solve themselves in the calm light of home 
affections. The heart untutored turns to them, as if 
there a softer light arose to interpret the will of the 
Ruler of men. 

We link the past memories and affections of home 
to the hopes of another life. It is in this process, 
that the living power of truth takes root in the heart! 
and we find the growth of true religion to become 
the daily experience, rather than a question of specu- 
lative doctrine. 

In these vacant places Christ stands as the Con- 
soler. He was tried in all points like as we are. In 
all points, certainly, of sinless sorrow, we look to find 
Him always just before us. If we can practically 
separate, for the moment, from his perfect manhood, 
the common inferences of His divinity, which, true 
as they are, should never confuse the sensitive like- 
ness of His experience and our own— we can find 
Him filling these vacant places. True, no man 
comes in at the door in visible form and gesture 
to reprove the loud lamentations of noisy grief and 

* Gen. xlvii. 29, 31. f Gen- xlix . 2g> y 



330 THE CHURCH OF THE HOUSEHOLD. 



speak the word of miraculous recall to busy life ; but 
He is none the less always to be found there. Over 
the cold form of the child who is taken, we may feel 
His shadow pass, and claim his consolation in our 
grief— "She is not dead— she only sleeps." Who of 
us ever thinks of his sleeping family as in any sense 
lost to him ? And it is only a deeper sleep that 
separates the departed. The home is unbroken. Its 
numbers are complete. The Son of Man joins for us, 
by His precepts and promises, home and paradise! 
The Talitha-cumi, heard no more by the outward 
ear, is heard by faith. In the calm of the holy city, 
the redeemed awake to the light which needs no sun 
nor moon to create it Over every silent grave in 
our cemeteries the ear of faith can hear the words, 
"I am the Resurrection and the Life— he that" 
believeth in me, never dies." 

It is then by these sainted ones in our households— 
the true priests who stand between us and the last 
things— who were all ours once, in the weakness of 
the flesh, and now, ours still, stand in sight of the 
golden altar and see the great High Priest as He 
offers up our prayers and tears, that we get into the 
secret of a sound piety. They are half ours, and half 
of diviner kinship. We climb by faith on the affec- 
tions and sentiments which we shared in common for 
a while, and follow on to a reasonable, religious and 
holy hope. In the Church of the Household we 
find need for other forms of discipline— and follow 
the Son of Mary to find Him there the Way, the 



HOME—ITS VACANT PLAGES. 



Truth, and the Life. May God give us wisdom to 
purify, as husbands, mothers, or children, till these 
lesser rivulets of home-life may flow clear and pure, to 
unite in the Church Catholic here below — in the 
Church which at last needs no temple or rite, in the 
Holy City, of which Abraham once dreamed — of 
which all good men are dreaming still — the Church 
of the Redeemed, of which 



The saints make up the fabric, 
And the Corner-Stone is Christ. 



0V 



